Matt Mullican. That Person’s Heaven at Palazzo della Ragione in Bergamo
- Redazione
- 3 days ago
- 2 min read
From November 14, 2025, to January 18, 2026, the historic Palazzo della Ragione in Bergamo hosts That Person’s Heaven, a major solo exhibition by Matt Mullican, curated by Stefano Raimondi and produced by The Blank Contemporary Art.
Free and open to the public, the show inaugurates the 15th edition of the ArtDate Contemporary Art Festival, supported by Regione Lombardia and the Municipality of Bergamo, marking the return to Italy of one of the most influential contemporary artists after his 2018 retrospective at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan.
Since the 1970s, Matt Mullican (born in Santa Monica in 1951, living and working in New York and Berlin) has developed a complex system of symbols, pictograms, and color codes that map the structures of human knowledge and experience. In this chromatic cosmology, green represents material reality, blue everyday life, yellow ideas, red subjectivity, and black and white language itself. This visual grammar has become the artist’s method for shaping a personal universe—a conceptual grid through which to interpret existence.
The exhibition title refers to That Person, an alter ego that Mullican embodies under hypnosis, a persona that acts and speaks independently from the artist, expressing an unfiltered, at times childlike consciousness. The new large-scale installation on view in Bergamo was created entirely in a hypnotic state: a monumental 16x16 meter grid made up of thirty-two equal panels, half in black and white, half in red.
Produced in collaboration with Aquafil S.p.A. and Radici Pietro Industries & Brands S.p.A., both leaders in sustainable textile innovation, the work merges artistic exploration and advanced industrial processes. Here, the rational order of the grid meets the unpredictability of trance, generating a conceptual tension between structure and chaos.
Hypnosis becomes a tool for exploring altered states of consciousness, while silence—the central theme of ArtDate 2025—emerges not as emptiness but as a structural element that amplifies introspection and perception.
As Mullican explains: “Everything is in the mind. All images are mental. The black-and-white side is painted by that person; it’s about daily emotions and actions we don’t remember. The red side is about heaven, God, demons, and angels—different parts of the same story.”
In That Person’s Heaven, the artist turns inward, using the hypnotic state as a metaphor for artistic creation itself: an act of surrender to the unconscious, where meaning surfaces through images and gesture rather than intention.
The exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual catalogue published by Silvana Editoriale, with essays by Stefano Raimondi and Roberta Tenconi, and by a program of free educational workshops for children, curated by The Blank’s educational department.
With That Person’s Heaven, Mullican reaffirms art’s power to bridge the conscious and the unseen, transforming silence into a field of revelation.
Palazzo della Ragione, Bergamo
Piazza Vecchia, 8A
Date
14 novembre 2025 - 18 gennaio 2026