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21/3/2012

Matt Mullican

Galerie Micheline Szwajcer, Antwerp

My idea of knowledge is more affiliated with the eighteenth century than it is with the twentieth or twenty-first century. In the eighteenth-century, at least one had the idea that one could actually list all knowledge.

Matt Mullican (°1951, USA) is at pains to lend the world order and structure and thereby derive meaning from it. To do this, Mullican relies on the encyclopedic method to chart what he finds. In pursuit of this lifelong project, he has developed a system of pictograms as his personal model of a cosmology, the basis of which is a cartographic structure consisting of a color and sign system.

Accordingly, Mullican’s second solo exhibition with Galerie Micheline Szwajcer consists of several large-scale paintings and smaller iron and blown-glass sculptures. In his opinion, the latter’s reflective forms mirror the cosmology itself, as well as details from the cosmology. Inspired by historical systems for ordering the world, Mullican’s new series of oil-stick rubbings references the work of the Encyclopédistes, a group of Enlightenment intellectuals who compiled the ambitious Encyclopédie edited by Denis Diderot in the 18th Century. Their endeavor was founded on the belief that all knowledge could be apprehended in script and illustrations alike.

The exhibited rubbings, some of which nearly cover the wall from floor to ceiling, are either text-based or figurative. While the lyrical script canvases are directly derived from the plates of the encyclopedia, the colourful polyptychs represent Mullican’s self-proclaimed interest in ‘the possibility of somehow encoding it all’

Galerie Micheline Szwajcer
Verlatstraat 14 - Antwerp
Tuesday to Friday: 10:00 - 18:30
Saturday: 12:00 - 18:30
Closed on Sunday and Monday
Free admission

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