BERLIN.- On the occasion of this year’s Berlin Art Week, the gallery presents the first solo show with Berlin-based artist Alex Müller (*1969).

Alex Müller | Der Anfang steht schon fest

by Dominic Eichler

Everything we do rests on what has gone before. When we come to art, aesthetically speaking, we walk into a fully furnished room bringing along our fully furnished selves. For her first solo show at the gallery ‘Der Anfang steht schon fest’ (The Beginning is already Set) artist Alex Müller has reimagined the gallery’s upperclass bel etagé 19th century apartment with its classic proportions and lofty ceilings as if it were oddly re-domesticated. (An exhibition in a gallery is a cohabitation or form of vibe squatting, a claiming of someone’s space, if only a temporarily.) The artist’s constellation of diverse works summon up a subjective, fragmentary, familial space with many pasts and stories to tell. A suite of figurative paintings (some freestanding with ‘fat’ padded and stitched surfaces), curious sculptures (like Der Ursprung, 2024 that recalls a weird sex organ) and interventions (among them poppyseed wall drawings) echo, albeit strangely, experiences awakened from the artist’s family-minded memories and symbol-laden subconscious. Production and reproduction, seeds and reflections abound.

In this exhibition, Müller’s work also rubs up uncomfortably against the rule of thumb that an artist’s parents (unless they are art people themselves) rarely make their presence felt, whether in person in or as subjects, in their children’s galleries, or exhibition openings. There is something embarrassing even taboo about it. Although there are of course many famous exceptions (Louise Bourgeois, for instance), the fact that this still generally holds true is telling. I think Müller was intuitively aware of this and conscious of going where it hurts by introducing us through art works to her parents to see what happens. Der wiedergutmache Engel (The Amends Angel, 2024) for instance, is a clothing sculpture consisting of a leather jacket the artist inherited from her much-loved father after his recent death from cancer during the Covid pandemic. To complete the work, the artist has covered the surface with stamps from the former GDR—the animal kingdom, depiction of socialist monuments, flag waving youths… The artist’s father was spotted for most of his life for abandoning his family in the East as a young man. In an essay for the artist’s catalogue ‘Bis der Zeit Vergeht’ (2023) accompanying her recent solo institutional exhibition at Kunsthalle Nürenburg, I explored Müller’s family’s history as it relates to her work. I was conscious that speaking about a working class family straddling two Germanys in the postwar WWII period—a more commonplace than acknowledged a tale as it is—was more than worth examining though also strangely seldom addressed in contemporary German art of note. Some stories and narratives get told, others not.

For all of its gusto, raucous joyful making and occasional pointed oversharing, Müller’s work is not afraid to examine where pain comes from. I am suspicious of art that pretends it has it all worked out, is perfectly pitched and brought to market. Contrast that in your mind with the poignant ink on canvas painting Das Ja (The Yes, 2016). The image depicts the artist’s mother reimagined in a washy deep blue sitting in her wheelchair where she was to remain for twelve years after a stroke. (I can count perhaps on one hand images of wheelchairs in contemporary painting. Art wants to see some things and not others.) The paintings both reaches out and tests the limits of empathy, even between a mother and child. And more generally, the gap between art and real life experiences, not just the artist’s but yours too.

Thus, to open the exhibition, a hall of mirrors, the installation Ihr bei mir (2024), greets the visitor. For the artist, viewers too, are the beginning that has already been set. A series of rooms and doors dotted with diverse works then creates choices. To the right is a surrealistic ‘bathroom’ in which the dried pea-covered bathtub sculpture Der Anfang steht schon fest (2024) takes absurd, center stage. During a studio visit the artist explained:

“Das Badezimmer ist für mich immer der Ort gewesen. Jetzt nicht mehr, weil ich rauche. Jetzt ist es der Balkon. Aber als ich noch zu Hause gewohnt habe, oder als ich bei meiner Großmutter in der DDR war, war das Badezimmer immer der Ort, an den ich mich zurückgezogen habe. Immer. Und selbst wenn ich nicht auf die Toilette musste, habe ich mich auf das Klo gesetzt. Und wo habe ich draufgeschaut? Auf die Badewanne, immerzu auf die Badewanne. Und dann gingen da draußen die Diskussionen los. Die DDR, die Mauer, wieder Pakete machen, und du hörtest es schon von weitem. Also es war ja jeden Tag Thema.”

Elsewhere too, Müller’s work evidences her magpie’s eye for the moving and absurd in the everyday world of things and images, materials and making. Unsurprisingly then, many of her work springs from collections of odd reminders and keepsakes (even the last slithers of bathroom soap) that might be useful later, suggesting a sensibility akin to a sound artist making field recordings from (one’s internal, emotional) life. Along the way, her work freely borrows from rich art making traditions, including surrealism, and the Fluxus and Feminist movements, although without being fussed about orthodoxy. In the air around her works are the ever present questions: who values what, who keeps and treasures what? And in art, true value is nothing less than the constant unfolding of meaning.

—Dominic Eichler