Matt Mullican was born on September 18, 1951, in Santa Monica, California, and earned his BFA at the California Institute of the Arts. He became famous as a member of The Pictures Generation alongside artists such as Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, David Salle, James Welling, Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler, Richard Prince, and Robert Longo. Mullican’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally since the early 1970s in venues including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Haus Der Kunst in Munich, the National Gallery in Berlin, the Stedelijk Museum in Schiedam, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Over more than forty years of his career, he has developed a vocabulary of signs and symbols that offers a multifaceted view of the universe. His classification system, called the “Five Worlds,” divides reality into five categories, each represented by a color: green for physical elements, blue for daily life, yellow for art and culture, black for language and signs, and red for subjectivity and ideas. Since the 1970s, Mullican has been known for his hypnotic performances. During these performances, Mullican channels an alter ego known as “That Person,” who exhibits extreme and irregular behavior. The drawings created by Mullican while hypnotized are often exhibited and attributed to “That Person.” Using these techniques of hypnosis and deep concentration, he reflects on existence and demonstrates how understanding the world is a personal construction.

The Feeling of Things [april – september 2018] Milano

“The Feeling of Things” is the largest solo exhibition ever held by Matt Mullican and his first retrospective in Italy. For the exhibition, the artist designed a monumental sculptural structure shaped like his iconic five-colored cosmologies, occupying almost the entire 5,000 square meters of the exhibition space. Visitors are invited to enter and walk through this architecture, discovering the thousands of works displayed inside. Featuring a wide selection of works from the 1970s to the present, including paintings, frottages, flags, glass sculptures, works on paper, videos, light boxes, floor works, and large installations, the exhibition explores the most cryptic and profound aspects of life.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog focused on Matt Mullican’s photographic production, including all his analog photographs from the 1970s and 1980s, as well as his more recent digital shots, which include views of the Milan exhibition, taken exceptionally by the artist himself.