Matt Mullican is an American conceptual artist whose work combines drawing, printmaking, sculpture, video, and performance to explore the subjective. By intersecting common subjects and personal semiotics, Mullican's work decodes images and signs through the use of diagrams and patterns. The construction of patterns and possibilities of how they might be broken down creates the core of Mullican's practice. Using his own unconsciousness and the state of hypnosis as a point of departure for many of his works, his practice aims to conceive a relationship between the objective, the subjective, and their representation, unravelling thus what lies beyond the universe of images.

- Untitled, 1991
is an example of Mullican's particular system of realities representation made up of images, pictograms, codes, signs, and colours. The use of colour-coding represents a longstanding cornerstone to Mullican's work; green stands for material, blue for the everyday world, yellow for ideas, white and black for language, and red for the subjective. The work's visual vocabulary interpolates traditions, scientific studies, beliefs, cultures of different times and places to ponder the age-old existential questions and aspects of life. Drawing on elements taken from the real world, the use of old scientific illustrations in the work gives rise, through their organization and fragmented mode of depiction, to a set of personal pictograms which examine the relationship between reality and perception, while providing a structure for the study of the complexities of the human condition. Part of the "Rubbings" series, a frottage-like technique, where the artist transfers a group of existing images reminiscent of historical - scientific drawings and studies onto the canvas, these images create a sense of absence and even abstraction, as a consequence of their removal from their initial context. They become empty copies absent of relation and meaning, questioning the modes of its existence, as juxtaposed against the originality of the artwork they have become a part of. - Untitled, 1991
- , like much of Mullican's work, represents a
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sual system speculative of philosophies, intuitions, phenomena, human interaction, and the psyche's intricacies- .


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