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.

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