Matt Mullican
Model Architecture

Matt Mullican (born 1951 in Santa Monica, California, lives in New York) is a multimedia artist in the broadest sense. The scope of his media and forms of expression is enormous, ranging from fragile models to to bulky sculptures, from reliefs to drawings, collages, light boxes, computer animations, glass works, video and performances. Mullican essentially works on systematizing a subjective world view. To this end he has developed a system of pictograms as his personal model of a cosmology.

Lentos is the first Austrian museum – after the Vienna Secession in 1994 – to show a substantial survey of the work by this concept artist and sculptor, who is regarded as one of the most influential artists of his generation. The red thread running through several decades of his work is the concept of the model. The exhibition presents this specific aspect of Mullican’s work, while simultaneously presenting a retrospective along one of the artist’s important themes with works from the late eighties to the most recent productions.
Models are central to Mullican´s work. They serve more as a medium for conveying relationships between ideas and notions than for referring to (larger) realizations. In Lentos Mullican will provide an overview of these models in their highly diverse forms and formats, two – and three-dimensional, in such diverse media and material as paper, glass, textile, ceramics, wood and video works.

One of the most recent works, ​“Learning from that person´s work”, consists of a room sequence of drawings created in conjunction with Mullican´s trance works: visitors enter, so to speak, the consciousness of a – ​“this” – person.
Whereas the use of models for visualizations is familiar in architecture and science, Mullican´s objects operate in the realm of imagining as models of ideas.

Mullican regards his lectures as a separate work format, which could be regarded as performances in their arrangement and intensity.

A catalogue will be published in the course of the exhibition by Hatje Cantz Verlag. A limited edition will be published with a specially developed work by Mullican (inquiries at the Lentos Museum).