Pirelli Hangar Bicocca presents "The Feeling of Things", the largest retrospective ever made on the work of Matt Mullican (Santa Monica, California, 1951), one of the most recognized American artists, active since the early seventies and pioneer of the use of hypnosis as a performative practice in art. The exhibition project, which includes thousands of works, immerses the visitor in the articulated cosmology of the "five worlds" conceived by the artist: a singular system of representation of reality made up of images, pictograms, icons, codes, signs, symbols and colours. A visual vocabulary capable of interpolating traditions, scientific studies, beliefs and cultures of different times and geographies to question the existential questions of all time and the most hermetic and profound aspects of life.
In Pirelli HangarBicocca over forty years of work by Matt Mullican starting from the seventies in which he attended, as a student of John Baldessari, the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia (USA), the school of fine arts supported, among others, by Walt Disney, up to recent works, from 2018, specially made for the Milan exhibition.
In addition to a vast iconographic sample: Mullican gives life to his personal pictograms ("Signs"). drawing from elements taken from the world of films and comics, from contemporary communication icons, as well as from airport signs, from scientific illustrations, from images derived from different traditions (such as Hindu mandalas, tantric images and Hopi Indian symbols) and from others of a primordial nature, also relating to the idea of birth and death, of fate and destiny.
The exhibition, curated by Roberta Tenconi, occupies the 5.000 square meters of the naves of Pirelli HangarBicocca. Visitors are invited to walk through this space by entering an imposing rectangular architectural structure, divided into five areas of different colors whose features refer to the artist's iconic cosmologies.
From 12 April to 16 September 2018
