MATT MULLICAN. THAT PERSON’S HEAVEN

Matt Mullican. That Person’s Heaven, curated by Stefano Raimondi and produced by The Blank Contemporary Art, is currently on view at the historic Palazzo della Ragione in Bergamo from 14 November 2025 and will be open to visitors until 18 January 2026. The exhibition marks the return to Italy of one of the most significant contemporary artists and inaugurates the fifteenth edition of ArtDate, the Contemporary Art Festival supported by Regione Lombardia and the Municipality of Bergamo, which this year unfolds across more than forty events throughout the city around a central theme: silence. For Palazzo della Ragione, Mullican has conceived a new large-scale environmental installation, created in collaboration with Aquafil S.p.A. and Radici Pietro Industries & Brands S.p.A., positioned between hypnosis and awareness, extending his exploration of states of consciousness, language, and systems of meaning.

The American artist, whose works are included in the collections of major international museums – including the MoMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Tate in London, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris – returns to exhibit in an Italian institution following his retrospective at Pirelli HangarBicocca in 2018, with a project specifically designed for the architectural and symbolic particularities of Palazzo della Ragione. Since the 1970s, Matt Mullican (1951, Santa Monica, California; lives and works in New York and Berlin) has developed a complex system of symbols, pictograms, and color codes through which he organizes and communicates knowledge, language, and meaning: green refers to the material realm, blue to everyday life, yellow to ideas, black and white to language, and red to the subjective. This chromatic device, which has become his distinctive visual vocabulary over time, forms the basis of a personal cosmos, a theoretical and perceptual grid capable of interpreting every aspect of human experience.

The title of the exhibition refers to That Person, a specific figure that Mullican “becomes” during hypnotic sessions: an alter ego that does not fully coincide with the artist but inhabits his body and uses his voice, expressing itself through childlike gestures and a seemingly unfiltered language, oscillating between chaos and moments of surprising lucidity. It is in this hypnotic state that the central work of the exhibition emerges, a monumental 16×16 meter square grid composed of thirty-two works of equal dimensions, half in black and white and half in red, occupying the space like a mental atlas translated into visual form. Mullican employs hypnotic trance as a working tool, a device for probing altered states of consciousness and generating unique performative experiences.

Matt Mullican, That Person’s Heaven, 2025, installation view, Palazzo della Ragione, Bergamo
Courtesy the artist and The Blank Contemporary Art
Photo Credits: Roberto Marossi

In this context, silence is not a mere absence of sound but a constitutive element that intensifies self-awareness and viewer immersion: it becomes a suspended time in which images, symbols, and unconscious memories surface, actively facilitating access to perceptual dimensions that are otherwise difficult to reach in ordinary conditions. Mullican’s hypnotic practice demonstrates how art can serve as a vehicle for exploring the mind through non-verbal languages and visual structures that precede or exceed articulated discourse. The artist states: “Everything is in the mind. All images are mental. The black-and-white side is painted by that person. That person is what I become in hypnotic trance. The script is painted. The script is mental. The subject is time. The subject is what I do after waking up and before going to work. It concerns the details and emotions of everyday life. It concerns the subject of our emotions performing actions we will not remember doing. The right side concerns the overall picture but is not necessarily real. It concerns heaven, God, demons, and angels before birth and after death. There are no words on the right side! It is all abstract! They are different parts of the same story. They answer the questions: Where was I before I was born? Why do things happen to me while I live my life? Where do I go after death?”

In That Person’s Heaven, the hypnotic practice acts as a true short-circuit within the rational structure of the work: if the grid represents for Mullican the instrument to order, classify, and rationalize the world, hypnosis introduces an element of unpredictability that injects chaos into a strictly organized system, placing the entire conceptual architecture under tension. From this clash between order and disorder emerges a primordial force, as if the marks produced in the hypnotic state contain a form of truth more raw and less mediated than what is accessible in wakefulness. The hypnotic process thus becomes a metaphor for the artistic condition itself: for Mullican, art does not arise primarily from an act of will but from a radical openness to being inhabited and traversed by images, languages, and visions.

Born in Santa Monica in 1951 and trained at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, where he earned a BFA in 1974, Matt Mullican has exhibited extensively in Europe and the United States, participating in Biennales and Documenta, and received the Possehl Prize for International Art in 2022. His major solo exhibitions include the Musée des Arts Contemporains au Grand Hornu, the de Young Museum in San Francisco, the Skulpturenhalle in Neuss, Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, and the Kunstmuseum Winterthur. His works are held in the collections of institutions such as MoMA, Whitney Museum, Tate, Centre Pompidou, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, and the National Gallery of Art.

The Blank Contemporary Art, founded in 2010, is today one of Italy’s leading institutions dedicated to contemporary art, recognized as a regional authority by Regione Lombardia and active in producing exhibitions, residencies, public projects, and publications, collaborating with artists including Yayoi Kusama, Francesco Vezzoli, Lawrence Weiner, Giulio Paolini, Pipilotti Rist, and Ed Atkins. As part of the ArtDate Festival program, The Blank’s educational services will organize free workshops in the coming months for children aged five to ten, aiming to introduce participants to some of the key languages of Mullican’s research in an experimental and participatory form. The exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual catalogue published by Silvana Editoriale, featuring texts by Stefano Raimondi, Artistic Director of The Blank, and Roberta Tenconi, curator at Pirelli HangarBicocca, offering critical insight into the new installation and the broader trajectory of the artist. That Person’s Heaven is produced by The Blank Contemporary Art, with the support of Regione Lombardia and in cultural collaboration with the Municipality of Bergamo, made possible through partnerships with Aquafil S.p.A., a leading global producer of synthetic fibers internationally recognized for ECONYL® yarn, and Radici Pietro Industries & Brands S.p.A., a historic Italian textile flooring manufacturer, both committed to sustainability and cutting-edge research. Alias serves as the technical partner for furnishings.