From November 21, 2008 to February 5, 2009, The Drawing Center will present Matt Mullican: A Drawing Translates the Way of Thinking in the Main Gallery. Featuring over 100 works from throughout his artistic career, including never-before-seen drawings, notebooks, rubbings, video, and mixed media installations, the exhibition will be the most comprehensive of Mullican’s work in drawing in the United States to-date.

For over three decades, Matt Mullican has created a complex body of work concerned with systems of knowledge, meaning, language, and signification. Ranging from schematic diagrams and arcane symbols to explicit text-based drawings, installations, and self-created cosmologies, Mullican’s work classifies, orders, describes, maps, and represents an understanding of the world, using drawing to collapse the division between subject and object.

Since the 1970s, Mullican has conducted performances and created drawings under hypnosis to investigate the nature of the subjectivity and identity. Mullican’s practice ultimately confronts the nature of subjective understanding, rationality, perception, and cognition­ — proposing a “picture” of the world articulated through the medium of drawing. This exhibition is curated by João Ribas, Curator, The Drawing Center.