Mullican is possibly more known and appreciated in Europe than in the US. Born in Santa Monica / California in 1951 he had part of his artistic education in the Netherlands and it was here and in Belgium that he received his first exhibitions. Flip Bool, curator at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag in the mid eighties acquired a large Matt Mullican for the collection of the Gemeentemuseum and this, together with a beautiful and impressive Donald Judd garden sculpture were 2 of the acquisitions i admired very much at that time and over the years both have proven to be important and valuable additions to the collections of the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag.
His work is concerned with systems of knowledge, meaning, language, and signification. Mullican also works with the relationship between perception and reality, between the ability to see something and the ability to represent it.
Mullican work is still very appealing to me. But unfortunately executed on a scale that is hard for a private collector to add this to their collections. It is executed at a scale that needs space, museum space or a large office hall space and therefore for me only to be admired at a distance. Only one publication on Mullican is available at www.ftn-books.com. But it is an important one in a limited edition by Imschoot.
