Matt Mullican

Born 1951 in Santa Monica, CA

Lives and works in New York and Berlin

Since the 1970s, Matt Mullican’s multi-media artistic practice has been concerned with signification, representation and knowledge systems. Mullican investigates how signifying processes function and how objects become charged with meaning. This has led him to establish his own subjective 5-part classification system, which he calls his “theory of the five worlds”. In this cosmology, each colour corresponds to different levels of perception: green stands for material, blue for the everyday world, yellow for ideas, white and black for language and red for the subjective. This non-verbal language system of signs and pictograms is the common thread throughout his work, which ranges in media across painting, sculpture, drawing and photography, to film, neon, stained glass works, rubbings, installation and also performance.

Mullican’s work not only questions the nature of reality and the universal order’s perceived truths, but also highlights the “constructed-ness” of our world. Similarly, he explores unconscious perception and interpretation through hypnotherapy, at times undergone with an audience as a public performance. In this way, his artistic practice can be regarded as an attempt to provide alternative models for explaining the world and our existence.