Matt Mullican: 25 Gardens
Format: Art in architecture/Outdoor installation
Location: 1100 Vienna, Hertha-Firnberg-Straße 7, residential complex “Hängende Gärten”
Architecture: Günter Lautner, Nicolaj Kirisits
Creation: 2003
Artist: Matt Mullican (*1951 in Santa Monica, lives and works in Berlin and New York City)
Info/Scope: In the multi-part outdoor installation 25 Gardens, Matt Mullican develops one of his characteristic cosmologies of things together with residents; participation enables the inspirational power of art to be experienced alongside the work itself, contributing to the formation of identity.
Dimensions of the installations:
8 garden reliefs: 20 x 40 bis 80 x 160 cm
2 sculptures: 50 x 100 bis 200 x 400 cm
Structural scale: “Hängende Gärten”: 101 residential units
Matt Mullican: 25 Gardens
Participation, an experience of space, and the personal cosmos of things are important themes for Matt Mullican's art-in-architecture intervention for the “Hängende Gärten” residential complex (architecture: Günter Lautner, Nicolaj Kirisits). This important conceptual artist began figuratively and found his way via the comical to his unmistakable language of signs, or simple concise symbols reminiscent of traffic signs: boldly painted, sewn into flags, engraved in glass or cast as linear steel sculptures. He doesn’t think in words or images, but in emotions: “Everything I show is real to me, it’s animated and it has a story. With my work, I try to understand the nature of life.” With 25 Gardens, he not only created a work for, but with the residents, inviting them to contribute personal objects: the artist integrated roller skates, drums, books and stuffed animals into his own cosmology and cast them as pictorial reliefs that can be found in the building’s open, communal spaces.
