In his work, the German-British artist Michael Müller (*1970) explores aesthetics and visual complexity, which he analyses through material research and experimentation. Drawing on historical narratives, scientific methods, social norms, linguistic and numerical systems, he has developed an artistic practice that keeps pushing these systems and structures to their limits through variations, transformations, manipulations and modifications.
The artworks exhibited at Galerie Haas Zürich were created between 2012 and 2022. With a focus on the processing of images, materials, colors and their dimensional representation, the pieces are a perfect example for the complexity of Michael Müller’s creative process.
The choice to elaborate art on different levels has become increasingly complex over the years, allowing Michael Müller to evolve the concept of material and artistic representation. Are they paintings? Are they sculptures? Are they installations? Questions that do not necessarily need an answer or that at the same time find an answer in all of them.
As Dr. Martin Engler well argues in his essay The Difficult Pictures of Michael Müller in the accompanying exhibition catalogue, with his independent interpretation of painting behind the glass, the artist formulates a fundamentally paradoxical concept of creating. In this sense, the idea of a gestural painting behind glass becomes a deliberately contradictory, broken-into-itself, painterly setting. The glass is painted from both sides and its transparency is backdropped by opaque picture supports. The how and where of the painting is further and further confused and obscured when the different picture supports are painted or digitally printed directly or by means of an impression process.
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