Opening reception with the artist Saturday, 28 February, 12–7pm
Peter Freeman, Inc. is pleased to present The Universe, Matt Mullican’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring a single new work comprised of 9,519 collaged and hand-numbered sheets, approximately 6,700 of which are installed in an immersive layout that fills the gallery.
The Universe (2023–2025) is Mullican’s latest “book,” a category of artwork he conceived and began using in the early 1970s in various formats, including drawing, collage, prints, photos, lightboxes, and rubbings. Mullican has stated that “everything is a sequence,” and “it is hard to say when it is not a book.” For The Universe, Mullican used two copies of the 1990 edition of the Random House Encyclopedia (originally published in 1977) as his starting point, cutting out every image or chapter title per page, collaging each onto individual sheets, and numbering the sheets according to their published order.
Mullican retained the encyclopedia’s two-sectioned structure—Colorpedia, which consists of brightly illustrated essays on overarching topics, from “Life on Earth” to “Man and Science,” and Alphapedia, which consists of alphabetically arranged summaries on particular subjects. The sheer volume of images isolated from these sections highlight the breadth of information contained within a single reference book and how each image relates to one another without text. This dissection of widely disseminated knowledge continues Mullican’s lifelong exploration into the signs and symbols that make up both his own artistic universe and the real world.
Installed in sequential order, the vast array of sheets wrap around gallery walls, freestanding bulletin boards, and a low platform that nearly fills the floor of the larger gallery space. The rest of the sheets remain within the work’s organizational storage system, 25 boxes and 101 envelopes that mirror the encyclopedia’s table of contents, exhibited in such a way that their volume takes on its own sculptural quality. The two copies of the encyclopedia from which the artist sourced his images are on display along with an intact handling copy. While the work consists of 9,519 sheets, Mullican’s page count only reaches 9,496. Discrepancies and miscalculations illustrate the difficulty in processing such an enormity of information.
Matt Mullican (b. 1951, Santa Monica, California) lives and works in New York and Berlin. He earned his B.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts in 1974. In 2022, he had a series of retrospective exhibitions presented by the Possehl Foundation in Lübeck, Germany and was the recipient of their Possehl Prize for International Art. Other recent solo exhibitions have been held at Palazzo della Ragione, Bergamo, Italy (2025–2026); Musée des Arts Contemporains au Grand Hornu, Belgium (2020); de Young Museum, San Francisco (2019); Skulpturenhalle, Neuss, Germany (2019); and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan (2018). Mullican’s work is represented in major institutions including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Tate, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museo National Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; and National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.