Matt Mullican
January 17 to March 15, 2014
Potsdamer Str. 97, 10785 Berlin
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