Matt Mullican
New Edinburgh Encyclopedia, 1825

Opening – 26 APR 2024, 6-9 pm

Galerie Thomas Schulte is pleased to present a solo exhibition of installations and editions by Matt Mullican on the occasion of this year’s Gallery Weekend Berlin. In rows of assembled images and objects in metal, paper and glass, New Edinburgh Encyclopedia, 1825 foregrounds the artist’s long-established encyclopedic approach and engagement with systems of knowledge, order and representation. While the works on view – produced in the 1990s – draw on an encyclopedia dating back nearly 200 years, they nonetheless point to the ways we attempt to categorize, contain, and understand the world in our current internet age.

The work referred to in the exhibition title consists of two parts: 449 magnesium relief plates mapping the contents of the titular encyclopedia, and the rubbings on paper that were made from them. Rarely shown together, here the physical transfer and reproduction of images and knowledge is enacted through their proximity and across different spaces of the gallery. In the work Untitled (20 glass balls), displayed alongside the installation of metal plates, information has been cataloged in another way. The artist’s own reference system, his cosmology, is mapped onto balls arranged on a wooden table – putting the hierarchy of the chart into question, while dematerializing it through transparent glass. Taken as a whole, New Edinburgh Encyclopedia, 1825 offers a focused yet expansive view of a decades-spanning practice that continues to reflect the simultaneous drive toward and sheer impossibility of knowing and representing everything in its entirety.