‘This show is the largest of my life so far. I had to build many walls to hold my ideas,’ says Matt Mullican of his retrospective ‘The Feeling of Things’ at HangarBicocca. ‘It’s an immense, extraordinary, impossible task, to map the world within us. And I’m talking about every individual world. One can try and paint it, write it, act it out, dance it, play it as in a piece of music, but it is not going to happen.’ With more than 6,000 works on display, ranging from the 1970s to the present (including sculptures, neons, photos, paintings, videos, performances, computer-based projects and a selection of readymade objects from Milanese scientific museums), it seems Mullican has at least attempted the feat in the gargantuan space of HangarBicocca. Organized into five colour-coded ‘worlds’, with curator Roberta Tenconi, Mullican has taken a ‘more is more’ approach to his retrospective. Fitting, perhaps, as the US artist also famously duplicates himself as ‘That Person’ – an art-making alter ego he created in 1977 who emerges only under self-induced hypnosis.
- Barbara Casavecchia