Lars Dittrich and André Schlechtriem are pleased to present DIE FUGE, by Simon Mullan. For his first solo-exhibition with the gallery in Berlin, Mullan has prepared an ambitious intervention spanning all 4 rooms of the gallery space. Continuing his signature aesthetic of segmented and coded utilitarian materials, the artist has completely reconstructed the front walls of the gallery space using ceramic white tiles with an Anthracite grey grout. This seemingly indiscriminate middle-grey then replaces the standard white walls of the remaining gallery space, repurposed as the backdrop to 4 new contrasting black tiled wall-objets from his series Popularis and 2 pendulous soft sculptures of altered Alpha Industries bomber jackets.

“Simon Mullan’s spaces investigate the grids of a perspective on art history, its intersections and -faces with the continuum. They flow because they are conscientiously paved. Mullan’s spaces are absolute spaces, tiled, gridded, topologically reversibly unequivocal, suitable for Euclidean operation, geometrically rectilinear, rinse-off, clinical, glossy and matte, gray.“

With the Popularis series, Mullan works “with the fugacious joints, the synaptic clefts in which transmission takes place. The joint joins and separates: it is pure distinction, the scene of the critic’s craft, in the literal sense of the Greek “kritiké tékhne,” of “krínein,” of distinguishing and setting apart. The tile setter orders the cosmos (Greek for “adornment, jewelry”) and lays it out like an oracle: Everything flows. Everything is installation art (…).

The works in the Alpha series, patchwork constructions out of fabric parts taken from the classic MA-1 flight jacket—the iconic garment better known as the bomber jacket—call several traditions to mind. They share the cartographic quality of the Popularis, though they resemble nothing so much as aerial photographs of endless fields of industrial food production, capturing possible targets of those bombers as well as satellite surveillance scenarios and the hunger for completeness that drives Google Earth and similar ventures. But the same patterns serve as camouflage against those image recognition programs as well.

They are also quilts, social mosaics of different subcultures from the second half of the twentieth century ranging from army and air force uniforms across punks, skinheads, and mods to neo-Nazis and the gay fetish scene, from everyday apparel worn primarily by the working class to the elementary essential high fashion object that the jacket, usually manufactured by Alpha Industries but copied and quoted by both upmarket and downmarket competitors, has become.”

Simon Mullan - DIE FUGE
Dittrich & Schlechtriem, February 13 - April 02
www.dittrich-schlechtriem.com