More Details from an Imaginary Universe, Matt Mullican

In 2001, in cooperation with several major European museums, Museion devoted a solo exhibition to Matt Mullican. The show was accompanied by an extensive catalogue, which chronicled twenty years of the American artist’s work. The volume includes an essay by Allan McCollum, who astutely describes the characteristics of “Matt Mullican’s world” and reveals the message communicated in the work currently on view at Museion Passage: “A large part of Mullican’s work is an ever-growing ensemble of single images, which he refers to as his ‘signs.’ Not without irony, these signs are represented in a familiar style: that of those idealized, featureless pictographs we see in such public places where a commonality of language may not be taken for granted, as in international airports. Designed to take the place of words, these pictographs can represent a large range of concepts; they can direct us to a baggage area with a picture of a suitcase, or to a restaurant with the image of a knife and fork. Naturally, Mullican, of course, has added many images of his own to this ‘wordless’ vocabulary.” (Catalogue Matt Mullican. More Details from an Imaginary Universe: p. 27)

Matt Mullican
More Details from an Imaginary Universe
Texts by Michael Tarantino, Daniel Sherer, Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen, Kathy O’Dell and Allan McCollum
Bozen/Bolzano: Museion; Turin: Hopefulmonster, 2001
ISBN: 978-8877571175
English edition
289 pages
(out of print)

Annex (German / Italian), 34 pages
(out of print)