2010
20 copies
Signed and numbered
20 copies
Signed and numbered
62×31,5×2,5 cm
24.4×12.4×1 in.
24.4×12.4×1 in.
Composed of 32 signatures
Every plate is individually hand-rubbed, stamped and numbered
Every plate is individually hand-rubbed, stamped and numbered
American artist Matt Mullican delivers an epic overview of forty years of his own symbologies in the artist’s book edition he has created for Three Star Books. It is a masterpiece on several levels, in a continuation of other productions by the Parisian press, Mullican deftly shows how the thing itself, the artwork pointing to itself, functions as its own best history. In dozens of colored plates rubbed by hand with a special graphite crayon custom made for the artist in the United States, over wooden and paper matrixes created by the Mullican studio, a catalogue of the principal signs in Mullican’s prolific private software language have been mapped out. A visionary in the employment of computer imaging techniques since the 1970s, Mullican has developed pictures that look like circuit breakers, mapping programs, virtual worlds, and equivocations between language, signs, and pictures. Mullican catalogues his astonishing research into images of arresting essentialism.
Executed in a finite range of colors (red, blue, yellow, and green), on American paper made by the French Paper Company, the format and feel is like that of a newspaper such as the Wall Street Journal. Mullican’s new grammar conjures up everything from ancient alphabets and Etch-A-Sketch to pictograms that might decode our own time. Ranging in shape from simple squares, triangles, and circles, to dizzying jumbles of interlocking forms, from works that seem to run parallel to the paper plane, to others that point to extra-terrestrial worlds, Mullican’s cosmology is no less than a vision of a universe both utterly hermetic and private, as well as a clue to the nature of thinking itself. Each page sequence, carefully rubbed by hand by assistants from the Three Star Books and Mullican Studio, is both a copy and an original, both a drawing and a print, both a book and a picture.
The matrixes were carved in New York and the “printing”, or rubbing, has been done in Paris. The final selection of twenty-eight out illustrations are placed in a box constructed of cardboard and covered with an orange cotton material, a color not found in the book, and decorated with an original drawing by the artist. Some of the pages are double-page folios, others fold out into multiple-panel frames.
Matt Mullican’s book won the prestigious Prix Jean Lurçat in Paris, on 28 October, 2011. It is the only Grand Prize for Bibliophilia in France.
Executed in a finite range of colors (red, blue, yellow, and green), on American paper made by the French Paper Company, the format and feel is like that of a newspaper such as the Wall Street Journal. Mullican’s new grammar conjures up everything from ancient alphabets and Etch-A-Sketch to pictograms that might decode our own time. Ranging in shape from simple squares, triangles, and circles, to dizzying jumbles of interlocking forms, from works that seem to run parallel to the paper plane, to others that point to extra-terrestrial worlds, Mullican’s cosmology is no less than a vision of a universe both utterly hermetic and private, as well as a clue to the nature of thinking itself. Each page sequence, carefully rubbed by hand by assistants from the Three Star Books and Mullican Studio, is both a copy and an original, both a drawing and a print, both a book and a picture.
The matrixes were carved in New York and the “printing”, or rubbing, has been done in Paris. The final selection of twenty-eight out illustrations are placed in a box constructed of cardboard and covered with an orange cotton material, a color not found in the book, and decorated with an original drawing by the artist. Some of the pages are double-page folios, others fold out into multiple-panel frames.
Matt Mullican’s book won the prestigious Prix Jean Lurçat in Paris, on 28 October, 2011. It is the only Grand Prize for Bibliophilia in France.
