# Matt Mullican artist context and auction value notes

Canonical page: https://appraisily.com/artist/matt-mullican/
Profile generated: 2026-06-02T02:29:28.854Z
Quality: high confidence, strong sources

## Artist identity

- Nationality: American
- Common media: painting, installation art, photography

## About Matt Mullican

Matt Mullican (born 1951, Santa Monica, California) is an American visual artist who works across painting, installation, and photography. The son of artists Lee Mullican and Luchita Hurtado, he grew up within a creative household that shaped his engagement with sign systems, cosmologies, and the structure of perception. Mullican divides his time between Berlin and New York City and has held teaching positions, contributing to arts education alongside his studio practice. His work is held in major museum collections including Tate and is documented in the Getty Union List of Artist Names, VIAF, and the RKD Netherlands Institute for Art History. Mullican's output spans a wide range of media—from oil painting and rubbings to lightboxes, banners, and video—unified by an ongoing investigation into how images encode meaning and how individuals map their subjective experience of the world.

## Common works and media

Collectors may encounter Mullican's work in the form of oil and acrylic paintings on canvas, rubbings on paper, lightbox and glass constructions, printed banners and posters, photographs, and video or performance documentation. Multiples and editioned prints also appear with some regularity at auction. His imagery frequently involves simplified pictographic signs, city-plan diagrams, and cosmological charts rendered in bold color palettes.

## Market and appraisal context

Mullican's work appears in the contemporary art market across several categories, including paintings, works on paper, prints and multiples, and installation-based pieces. His institutional presence—with works held by museums such as Tate—supports ongoing collector interest. Valuation of individual works depends on medium, scale, date of execution, provenance, exhibition history, and whether a piece is from a recognized series. Collectors should also consider condition reports and the distinction between unique works and editions. Specific realized prices should be checked against current auction records, as the source material for this page does not include individual sale results.

## Appraisily data basis

Appraisily artist pages combine artist identity research from authority files, museum records, and biographical sources with available auction records, sale dates, realized prices, and comparable lots. For Matt Mullican, identity data is drawn from Wikidata, the Getty ULAN, VIAF, the RKD, and the Tate collection page. Market-specific sale data was not available in this source pack and should be supplemented from auction databases for appraisal purposes.

## Sources

- Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q13539263
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Mullican
- Getty Vocabulary Program: https://vocab.getty.edu/page/ulan/500115023
- VIAF: https://viaf.org/viaf/45100880/
- Tate: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/matt-mullican-2228
- RKD: https://rkd.nl/en/explore/artists/58415