More Details from an Imaginary Universe

Title of Matt Mullican’s solo exhibition in Porto, Oxford, Barcelona, St. Gallen, Krefeld and Bolzano 2000-2001.

With persistent equability, Matt Mullican pursues the megalomaniac project to measure and to arrange the world in all details, with means that are related to different sciences and close to esotericism. Since the 1970s, he is exploring parallel worlds that symbolize his large-scale artistic project to find semiotic descriptions of the world by continuously developing systems of language and signs.

The methods Mullicans uses to categorize are playing light-handedly with the subjective and the objective, shifting between emblems and reality. They are alluded to already existing encyclopedic, taxonomic and archival practices, involve collections, cartography and lists, but also include specially drafted, seemingly rational systems of classification – like the two cosmologies that have been invented by Matt Mullican and that have evolved since several years. His methods are marked as radically subjective and even use hypnosis to explore subliminal aspects of his character.

Mullicans attempts to systematize are conducted by drawings and performances. They comment on written world views and orders and declare his own artistic intentions as doomed to fail.

The performative presentation will be accompanied by meticoulous drawings.

Matt Mullican (∗1951) has studied at the California Institute of the Arts. Since october 2009, he is professor in Sculpture at the Hochschule für bildende Künste, the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg. Besides of taking part at the documenta several times (1982, 1992, 1997), he has exhibited internationally in solo and group shows, a.o. Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2011, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2011, De Appel, Amsterdam, 2010, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2009, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2009, GAK, Bremen, 2009, ICA, London, 2009.

The lecture by Matt Mullican is held in connection with the seminar »Contemporary art between idea, content, and social media«, in which the project »Conceptual Paradise« is embedded, being realised in a collaboration of Stefan Römer and the Kunstraum of Leuphana University of Lueneburg since 2007.