YOUNG DUMB & BROKE
#1 Matt Mullican

Running in parallel to the revolving solo exhibitions at UKS, YOUNG DUMB & BROKE is a new series of displays mounting a single early work by a once young and unknown, today older and esteemed artist.

Low-fi, slack goofs, or prodigy pearls—the series explores the quest between young artists’ experiments and the hindsight of recognition and leverage of experience, borrowing its title from a billboard hit that was on the 2017 American Teen album by singer and songwriter Khalid.

First up is the work Untitled (his unconscious) from 1974* by the American artist MATT MULLICAN (b. 1951). Its motif—a simple, hand-drawn stick figure on US-legal sized paper—is foundational and still today reoccurring in Mullican’s practice. Through the abstracted human figure he has continuously probed the individual as a symbolic entity, whether by combining a basic sketch on paper with a short line saying, for instance, “his unconscious” or by abstracting and performing his own persona while undergoing hypnosis.

*Courtesy of Gallery Mai 36, Zurich.