Over the past four decades, Matt Mullican has created a multifaceted body of work encompassing drawing, collage, painting, photography, video, virtual reality, sculpture, installation, and performance under hypnosis. Trying nothing less than to “organize the world” and make sense of his existence, Mullican invented a personal cosmology to aid him with this fallible yet urgent task. The artist doesn’t shy away from describing his project as bordering on the impossible. His ritualistic attempts to create meaning take the place of a cosmic significance that he believes has gone missing.

Operating from an understanding of reality based entirely on perception, Mullican deconstructs the world according to a visual system of symbols and pictograms that define five color-coded realms: those of matter (green), everyday life (blue), culture and science (yellow), language (black and white), and subjective experience (red). Mullican has used a variety of means to represent and articulate these “worlds,” as he calls them, from complex organizational charts to detailed maps of fictitious cities that operate reflexively as “signs of signs.”

The sixty-four etchings and silkscreens in Untitled (Portfolio 2) offer an incomparable view into this iconographic cosmology. The conceptual similarities between Mullican’s pictorial universe and the icons that populate the screens of our smartphones and computers are striking. Considered in relation to these application-driven modes of representation, Mullican’s sign system feels uncannily anticipatory of our current modes of seeing and understanding the world.