Matt Mullican

In 2022, Matt Mullican (*1951) was awarded the Possehl Prize for International Art. The jury of members from internationally renowned art institutions honoured the life's work of the American artist, which continues to exert a significant influence on younger generations of artists to this day. Mullican was honoured as one of the pioneering representatives of the so-called Pictures Generation, who from the mid-1970s examined the influence of mass media images in everyday perception and thus declared them to be an integral part of artistic exploration. The artist deals with quite simple-sounding, yet very complex existential questions: Where do I come from? Where am I going to? He asks questions about the meaning of life and the order of the world and has been working for decades on an artistic classification system for his worldview, which he attempts to capture through installations in a wide range of media, some of which take up considerable space. His work is extends over many different fields, ranging from painting and various printmaking techniques to sculptural works and performances; his exhibitions always interact with the specific features of the surrounding space. Mullican's pioneering role in the interpretation of images and their impact is still particularly relevant in our digital age.

As part of the prize, the artist was given the opportunity to provide an in-depth look into fifty years of artistic work at four different locations in Lübeck over a period of six months. The curator of the overall project was Oliver Zybok.

MAPPING THE WORLD

FIVE COLOUR GARDEN

Matt Mullican started his MAPPING THE WORLD retrospective in Lübeck with the FIVE COLOR GARDEN: a circular bedding with flowers of many colours on the lawn outside Lübeck Cathedral. Black petunias, red busy Lizzies, white sweet alyssum, blue lobelias and yellow burr marigolds were used. Coming after a floral installation in Antwerp, this is the first time that the artist has used bedding plants to map out his universe of colours and shapes in Germany. 

The proximity to the sacred building forms a link to the artist's interest in spiritual questions, which can be seen at various points in his work. Here you can recognise his typical semantics of simple forms and colours, each of which has its own meaning in his "cosmology": green for matter, blue for our everyday world, black and white for language, red for the subjective and yellow for the arts or consciousness. If the choice of colour plays an important role, so do simple geometric shapes such as circles, triangles and squares play an important role for him, as their clarity allows them to be conveyed symbolically in a simple way and their general interpretation is already invested with meaning. A circle, for example, is the epitome of a symbol for life. This clear structure was exemplified on the Cathedral Lawn in the reduced range of colours and shapes and runs through all the exhibition venues in Lübeck like a thread.

The flower installation was realised and maintained according to the artist's wishes by the company Marli, a non-profit Lübeck company for people with disabilities.

MAPPING THE WORLD

FIVE WORLD CHART ON BRICK

The chalk work FIVE WORLD CHART ON BRICK was realised on the roof terrace of the European Hansemuseum. Here, Matt Mullican construed a town map from his five-world cosmology. Reworking a motif from the 1980s the artist presented a highly simplified form of urban development, which he transferred to the horizontal surface of the new brick building by whitening specific bricks. He sees the urban space itself as a sculptural work too, as a kind of "exercise in cataloguing the world, [...] as a theatre of memory." The decisive factor for him is how the human body determines the structures of a city, appropriates them or else is imprisoned, tormented or even buried by them.

MAPPING THE WORLD

CHURCH

The CHURCH exhibition in the University and Cultural Church of St. Peter in Lübeck, the "Berlin Block" shows a monumental work consisting of 211 large canvases, arranged in panels of six pictures each, which co-opted and emphasised the particular geometry and height of the church interior. Black marks on a white background, made using Mullican's characteristic frottage technique, were the leitmotif of this linguistic and semantic journey through many of the artist's themes. This piece also addresses the relationship between space, image and experience, a key topic in Matt Mullican's work.

MAPPING THE WORLD

50 YEARS OF WORK

The exhibition 50 YEARS OF WORK at the Kunsthalle St. Annen presents in an impressively condensed form with many examples the diverse range of media used by Matt Mullican. In addition to paintings and rubbings, some of them also in vast dimensions, the exhibits included steel sculptures, photographs, glass objects, performances, videos and computer animations, assembled as installations and arrangements that interact with their respective surroundings. At the centre of the exhibition was the voluminous piece "Representing the work" (2019), which in its symbolic, formal and chromatic combinations was designed to provide a complete overview of Matt Mullican's artistic endeavours.

PERFORMANCE UNDER HYPNOSIS. WAKING UP.

Matt Mullican has been intensely involved with performances under hypnosis since the late 1970s. His interest in trance states was sparked by his work with the stick figure Glen, who represents something of an alter ego for the artist. Using line drawings as models, Mullican began to demonstrate the existence of the figure he had created: by documenting Glen’s fictitious life in drawings, the figure increasingly took on a life of his own. With this extensive series of drawings he tried to pin down the relationship between artistic work and the processes of projection. In the 1980s, by contrast, Mullican’s main interest was in developing his complex system of signs. But he returned to the hypnosis project in 1996 with a series of 15 performances in Brussels, which he recorded on video. Since then Mullican has entered a trance state to represent that other person, who he thinks about as a figure in his work. Mullican’s aim is to convey via this person an experience of life as a structure that emerges from our memories and fantasies. His concern is not a subjective psychoanalytical process, but rather the typical situations in which we act – within the context of significant symbols.