Author Description

Published on the occasion of The Drawing Center's exhibition, Matt Mullican: A Drawing Translates the Way of Thinking presents a selection of the artist's work from throughout his career, emphasizing the role of drawing in his attempt to understand, organize, and categorize experience. For over three decades, Matt Mullican has created a complex body of work concerned with systems of knowledge, meaning, language, and signification. Since the end of the 1970s, he has also conducted performances and created drawings while under hypnosis as a means to explore the nature of behavior. Mullican s practice confronts the nature of subjective understanding, rationality, perception, and cognition; in essence, proposing a picture of the world through the medium of drawing. The book, number 82 in the Drawing Papers series, features a conversation between the artist and exhibition curator Joao Ribas, as well as writings by the artist, transcribed from his early notebooks.