The Inventive Mr. Mullican
- Mar 30, 2025
- 6 min read
Written by Michael Klein, Owner & Director
Michael Klein is best known for his work and achievements in the field of contemporary art. As both a dealer and curator, he has had a long and distinguished career as a New York gallery owner and director, representing an international roster of emerging and mid-career artists. He became the first in-house curator for Microsoft Corp.
In the early 80s, I began to assemble a group of artists to represent. I was evolving from being an agent to a full-time art dealer. All had a strong conceptual basis for their work. The office at 611 Broadway was an exhibition space with the beginning of a series of exhibitions. Pat Steir presented several of her triptych tree paintings based on 19th-century Japanese prints, Robin Winter presented an installation of elegant drawing tables and glass vases, and Matt Mullican presented his multi-panel rubbings on canvas.
Mullican’s art was of particular interest because I was intrigued by the use of symbols in the work of a contemporary artist, a member of what became known as the Picture Generation. Each member had a strong conceptual base and used various forms of representation in their works. For example, Cindy Sherman’s staged self-portraits and Robert Longo’s figurative studies of the club scene in the 80s.
I was drawn to the many possibilities in Mullican’s work, his ideas, and his vision, both as an art lover and a businessman. His aesthetic was constructed of a symbolic language of signs, symbols, and colours. Imagery was all drawn from contemporary life. It was his interpretation of the world broken down into four categories. As described on the website of the de Young Museum for his 2019 solo show:
Trying nothing less than to “organize the world” and make sense of his existence, Mullican invented a personal cosmology in which colours indicate different orders or “worlds.” The first order, identified by the colour green, is the material world. The second order, represented by blue, is everyday life. The third order is yellow and refers to culture and science. The fourth order is language, which appears in black and white. The last and most important order is subjective experience, rendered in red.
It is the relationship of these categories that allows him to invent a wide and varying range of works. What is quite remarkable about his language is that it can be adapted to all kinds of materials, whether on canvas, paper, cloth, glass, stone, or installation, as well as performance under hypnosis.
As his dealer, my instinct was to find situations where Matt could invent solutions for exhibitions and commissions—exhibitions at galleries and, of course, museums. Over the years, I planned the same for other artists I represented: Pat Steir’s Breughal Series, Elaine Reichek’s photographic project Native Intelligence, and Beverly Semmes’ large installation Yellow Pool. These exhibitions traveled, introducing the work to new audiences and promoting both the artist and the gallery.
Having visited Dallas, Texas, on a business trip, I saw the newly expanded museum. Back in New York, I met with Mullican and suggested he consider proposing a project for the museum. The Dallas Project was born, an installation of canvases that opened in 1987. Another solo show followed in Philadelphia at the Moore College of Art that same year, and after that, a show at the Brooklyn Museum.
From across the pond came an invitation to create works for the forthcoming Bath Festival in the summer of 1988. This opened the door to a European market and led to shows with gallerists in Zurich, Paris, Porto, Cologne, and Milan, as well as museum shows in Lille and Geneva. Each opportunity was a chance to expand the body of work and invent new kinds of works, depending on the scale of the space proposed and the budgets provided by the client. The studio was active nearly seven days a week with a busy production schedule, and my gallery was equally busy managing these commitments.
In 1989, the Hirshhorn Museum had another kind of project show called Works. It was organized by Ned Rifkin, who had included Mullican in a show when he was curator at the New Museum in New York. Here, Mullican designed and installed a rug, a colour-coded layout of his imagined city plan.
That same year, another invitation came for the very prestigious Project Series at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. With this project, he took his language in a new direction, translating the imagery into a digital format and presenting the images as light boxes. Working with John Whitney, founder of OPTOMYSTIC in Los Angeles, CA, they programmed and produced these digital representations and installed them on a single wall. The viewer walked in and had a panoramic view of this 12-part, highly realistic, and colorful landscape. As if a scientific report, each screen illustrated another aspect of Mullican’s imagined world, from buildings to rocks, from the sky to the sea. This installation added a whole new dimension to Mullican’s vision, a new direction to be explored, and further defined his encyclopedic vision to “organize his world.”
These early years of his career established him well. The tempo and expansion of works and exhibitions grew, as did sales. The possibilities were enormous, and the scale of the works ranged from pieces for private collectors to commissions for corporations and public art spaces. For example, the Art for Transit program of the MTA in New York City selected Mullican to create a wall for a newly renovated subway station at 50th Street. It was an 8-by-68-foot sandblasted black granite mural that presented a timeline of the history of the station site, atop which sits an office tower. Similarly, in midtown, Swiss Bank commissioned a large vertical wall for their new American headquarters in New York.
At the same time, in the mid-80s, I opened a second exhibition space in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Why? I wanted access to collectors and museums in Europe. It was a small ground-floor space on the Brouwersgracht. One of my first achievements as I worked there was a commission for the Gemeentemuseum in Den Haag for a stained glass piece by Mullican. The Hague commission was for a vertical, free-standing glass piece, each panel a separate color and etched with his usual symbols. Next, this was followed by an exhibition and sale of works to the Kroller-Muller Museum in Otterlo, home to a remarkable Van Gogh collection and modern and contemporary sculpture.
New Edinburgh Encyclopedia was a print project that was published in collaboration with the late Brooke Alexander and recently on view in Berlin at Thomas Schulte’s gallery. First came aluminum plates, then prints on paper, and the same images printed on canvas. Some sections were in color, others in black and white.
If the light boxes showed us the future via digital technology, then the print project brought it back to an earlier time when manual printing was the way to communicate images and ideas. Like the 18th-century Enlightenment encyclopedia of Diderot, it is meant to explain, define, and illustrate the world around us. The didactic nature of Mullican’s work has, to my mind, been overlooked by critics, and I think it is an important aspect of his work. It is the age-old question of who we are and why we are.
Since the 90s, Mullican has continued to elaborate on his various themes and ideas through a wide array of installations that always feature new ways in which to establish a dialogue with the viewer. For example, in a 1994 exhibition organized by the then Director of the Walker Art Center, Martin Friedman, Mullican built a three-dimensional version of his city, Five Into One. More recently, in 2013, a solo show entitled The World was held at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico and then in 2019 at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. He continues to explore, expand, and elaborate on his original iconography, using words and images collected to serve to define his world and, therefore, our world, too.
Read more from Michael Klein
Michael Klein, Owner & Director
Michael Klein's expertise lies in his role as a private art dealer and freelance, independent curator for individuals, institutions, and arts organizations. Today, Michael Klein Arts works with a diverse group of artists, estates, galleries, and non-profit institutions, providing management, curatorial, and other consulting services. At the same time, the company serves institutional as well as private collectors, focusing on developing collections of emerging, mid-career, and established artists. The company also organizes traveling exhibitions both in the United States and abroad.
