Matt Mullican USA, b. 1951

Born in Santa Monica in 1951, Matt Mullican lives and works between Berlin and New York.

Mullican was raised in a family of artists and studied at the California Institute of the Arts. He has taught at Columbia University, the School of Visual Arts in New York, and the London Institute, among other institutions.

His work resists fixed categories and conventional classifications. Mullican employs signs, pictograms, and images drawn from everyday life and the internet to generate a personal language system that functions as a model of cognitive perception, which the artist symbolizes through color. His works include finger paintings, colored flags, pictograms, reading performances, and hypnosis experiments conducted on himself and others. Through these practices, he explores possible modes of representation linked to the perception of reality.

His work has been the subject of numerous international exhibitions at venues including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Fundació Tàpies, Barcelona; Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, Milan; Kunsthalle St. Annen, Lübeck; Haus der Kunst, Munich; the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.

His work is held in the collections of institutions such as Tate Modern, London; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; MACBA, Barcelona; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.