Matt Mullican at Micheline Szwajcer
May 1st, 2012
Artist: Matt Mullican
Venue: Micheline Szwajcer, Antwerp
Date: March 22 – May 5, 2012
Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.
Images:
Images courtesy of Galerie Micheline Szwajcer, Antwerp
Press Release:
Matt Mullican (1951, USA) is at pains to lend the world order and structure and thereby derive meaning from it. To do this, Mullican relies on the encyclopedic method to chart what he finds. In pursuit of this lifelong project, he has developed a system of pictograms as his personal model of a cosmology, the basis of which is a cartographic structure consisting of a color and sign system.
Accordingly, Mullican’s second solo exhibition with Galerie Micheline Szwajcer consists of several large-scale paintings and smaller iron and blown-glass sculptures. In his opinion, the object’s reflective forms mirror the cosmology itself, as well as details from the cosmology.
Inspired by historical systems for ordering the world, Mullican’s new series of oil-stick rubbings references the work of the Encyclopédistes, a group of Enlightenment intellectuals who compiled the ambitious Encyclopédie edited by Denis Diderot in the 18th Century. Their endeavor was founded on the belief that all knowledge could be apprehended in script and illustrations alike.
The exhibited rubbings, some of which nearly cover the wall from floor to ceiling, are either text-based or figurative. While the lyrical script canvases are directly derived from the plates of the encyclopedia, the colourful polyptychs represent Mullican’s self-proclaimed interest in ‘the possibility of somehow encoding it all’.
Link: Matt Mullican at Micheline Szwajcer
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