installation view* of nine drawings included in Mullican's exhibition at the Drawing Center

Matt Mullican's just-closed show at the Drawing Center, "A Drawing Translates the Way of Thinking", was a treat. And what a perfect venue for this extraordinary artist!

When I first walked in and saw its extravagance, knowing even the little I did about the breadth of his sources, the bottomless well of his imagination and the complexity of his sytems, I told myself I was just going to walk around and enjoy myself in that huge room, where central, museum-like vitrines were surrounded by works hung tightly together until virtually no wall space was left uncovered. I stayed much longer than I expected to, but of course not long enough to give even a half-assed account of this extraordinarily beautiful show.

Here is a large excerpt from the press release prepared by the curator, João Ribas:

For over three decades, Matt Mullican has created a complex body of work concerned with systems of knowledge, meaning, language, and signification. Ranging from schematic diagrams and arcane symbols to explicit text-based drawings, installations, and self-created cosmologies, Mullican’s work classifies, orders, describes, maps, and represents an understanding of the world, using drawing to collapse the division between subject and object.

Since the 1970s, Mullican has conducted performances and created drawings under hypnosis to investigate the nature of the subjectivity and identity. Mullican’s practice ultimately confronts the nature of subjective understanding, rationality, perception, and cognition –proposing a “picture” of the world articulated through the medium of drawing.

*
The shapes which look like reflections? They are not.