Matt Mullican
Untitled, 1973-4/2015
9 archival inkjet prints on baryt paper, 34,5 x 23 cm
2 sets of 21 silscreened cards, 13 x 15 cm
16 mm film on DVD
Edition of 16

What connects black and white? What lies between them? And: How can you make this join visible? At this year’s abc, Helga Maria Klosterfelde will present a new edition based on three works by the American conceptual artist, Matt Mullican. A photo series, a film and two series of screen printed playing cards represent not only the meeting point of the two colourless colours, but also Mullican’s search for nothingness. The works were created when Mullican was a student of John Baldessari at the Californian Institute of Arts and are the starting point of the development of his language of images, symbols and text that Mullican uses today.

Matt Mullican, born in 1951 in Santa Monica, is a painter and conceptual artist who belongs to ‘The Pictures Generation’. His works have been exhibited internationally at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Museum of Modern Art (New York), Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), Haus der Kunst (München) and in the Neuen Nationalgalerie (Berlin).

Since 1997 H.M. Klosterfelde Edition has produced a total of 8 editions and multiples with the artist. Furthermore, the gallery published a catalogue raisonné of Matt Mullican’s editions and multiples in 2013.

For further information please contact Alfons Klosterfelde at +49 177 6233477 or office@helgamariaklosterfelde.de
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Helga Maria Klosterfelde Edition is pleased to present a new multiple by the American artist Matt Mullican. At first Untitled, 2014, looks easy to handle, quite small, just larger than an A4 piece of paper, a frottage on canvas in a handmade wooden box. Only upon closer examination does one see that the linen has been stretched over a massive slab of granite, whose flat surfaces are covered in the artist’s graphic inscriptions.

While the linen envelopes the front side of the slab (including the engravings beneath the spanned frottage), the rear surface, normally exempt from observation and framed by the folded cloth edges and stabilizing wooden supports, reveals a finely chiseled, diagrammatic drawing. With white strokes on a black background, the granite surface recalls a schoolroom chalkboard with its temporary yet universal function: always ready to be erased and rewritten, the chalkboard—even before Beuys—has long symbolized the drafting of new world visions, a surface to record fluxes of energy and ideational constructs.

Similarly universal are the drawings on both sides of this granite sheet, their forms tracing back to pages from Mullican’s extensive trove of handwritten notes, sandblasted here onto the stone. The rough impression of the oil pastel frottage on white linen achieves the same graphic quality as many of the artist’s other multiples, but without integrating the medium.

With Untitled, 2014, Matt Mullican broadens his formal and substantive spectrum to capture the differentiated interplay between image and medium, the drawn and the written, concealment and revelation, and visual and tactile perception. At the same time, the compilation of existential concepts on the box’s screen printed label makes reference to the cosmological character of the diagrams inside.

Since the late 1970s, Matt Mullican (born 1951, lives in Berlin and New York) has become one of the most important figures in American post-conceptualism. Through diverse media such as drawing, installation, performance, computer-based light boxes, and video, he sculpts models of the world that use symbols and pictograms to expose their own construction. The world as a system of signs comes within reach, at once universal and deeply subjective.

Untitled, 2014, is Matt Mullican’s fourth collaboration with Helga Maria Klosterfelde.
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Matt Mullican
‘Untitled’, 2014
Granite plate with reliefs
21 x 29,7 x 2 cm
Inside a stretcher frame with frottage
Oilstick on canvas
In custom-made wooden box
With signed and numbered certificate
Edition of 8

April 28 to September 1, 2012
Potsdamer Straße 97, 10785 Berlin

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November 2nd, 2006 to January 27th, 2007
Linienstraße 160, Berlin
photos: Susanne Ullerich

Since the late 1970s Matt Mullican (born 1951, lives and works in New York City) has been one of the most influential representatives of the US-post conceptualists. He uses different media such as drawing, installation, performance, computer based light boxes and video, i.e., to develop global models the construction of which is visualized in symbols and pictograms. The world as a system of codes is being transformed into an experience of a universal and deeply subjective order.
In 1997, Matt Mullican first developed Untitled for Helga Maria Klosterfelde Edition: Four mouthblown glass balls in a handmade glass box. Number, form and composition of this Multiple reflect Matt Mullicans preoccupation with cosmologic models as each of the glass balls show a different, hand painted pictogram. The glass balls are to be interpreted as a complex composition and a symbol par excellence that is at the same time fragile in its vitreous materiality.

Untitled, 1997, further transforms the above work into five photograms. Using this special photo related technique, popular in surrealism and rarely used by Mullican, results in an emphatic subjective perception in which the visible world of things is strongly alienated.

In addition, this show features a new Edition as work in process. As the artist continuously transforms his oeuvres different artworks, this recent piece will relate to those dating back: Four groups of four prints based on gouaches, each 56 x 43 cm, presented in a foldable frame, will further explore Mullicans complex language of signs in writing and drawing as a source for the cosmological model of the glass balls.

Please contact us for further information.
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