Matt Mullican
Gallery 2
27.01 - 24.03.1996
Curator: Milada Slizinska
Co-operation: Nigel Warwick
The exhibition of the work by the American artist, Matt Mullican will be opening at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw almost immediately after a similar presentation of his work at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, where the artist has just completed his year-long 'DAAD' residence.
Renowned for his immense banners of the familiar pictograms which the artist has jettisoned from the halls of airport and railway terminus', transforming their scale, while retaining their use of bold colour, and has suspended them over the viewer's head as visually seducing but cryptic ikons. Mullican has imbued their universal lexicon with forms taken from his own personal cosmological sources. He then re-represents them with complex and contradictory references from intensely private and elusive symbols while retaining the presentational format and style of the public information-based signs.
More recently, Mullican's work has incorporated the concerns and language of city planners. Again, the representation and abbreviation of meaning by signs and blocks of colour has evolved into the Le Corbusian utpian vistas of the artists own designs. Generated on computer, and occupying a virtual reality space, these glimpses of simulated futures are reproduced as single images and presented in lightboxes as architectural samples from some new, yet unrealized world.
The exhibition at the Centre will consist of works drawn from these two areas of Mullican's work as well as a large series of etchings on paper detailing the categorization of meaning represented in the diagrams and charts found in, for example encyclopedias. With a mixture of wall-mounted banners and lightboxes occupying the Centre's largest most prestigous gallery space, as well as two other spaces given to the display of the etchings on tables and shelves, this first exhibition in Poland achieves a comprehensive presentation of objects from every area of the artist's work. The banners presented here were created for the installation on the Temporary Contemporary building of Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art, which was designed by Frank Gehry, whose exhibition is to be seen now at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw.
Matt Mullican - selected solo exhibitions:
1973 - Project Inc., Boston
1976 - Artists Space, New York
1980 - Mary Boone Gallery, New York
1983 - Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
1984 - Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneva
1987 - "Concentrations 15: Matt Mullican", Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas
1988 - "Matt Mullican Untitled, 1986-87", The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn
1989 - "Projects: Matt Mullican", Museum of Modern Art, New York
Galerie Ghislaine Hussenot, Paris
1990 - Magasin, Grenoble
Portikus, Frankfurt am Mein
1991 - Rijksmuseum Kroeller-Mueller, Otterlo
1992 - Fondation Pour L'Architecture, Brussels
Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York
1993 - Kunstmuseum, Luzern
1994 - Wiener Secession, Vienna
1995 - IVAM, Valencia
Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin
1996 - Centrum Sztuki Wspolczesnej, Zamek Ujazdowski, Warszawa
The Centre for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle
Al.Ujazdowskie 6,
00-461 Warsaw, Poland
tel: (48 22) 628 12 71-3, (48 22) 628 76 83
fax: (48 22) 628 95 50
e-mail: csw@ikp.atm.com.pl