BERLIN.- Interwoven into a wide-ranging network of autobiographical references, Alex Müller’s first institutional solo exhibition in Berlin is a fascinating presentation of painterly, sculptural and installation works. Both poetic and objective, her paintings, objects and site-specific interventions mark stations and turning points in her personal and artistic life. The narratives are multi-layered and utilise the female form, the physical and subjective as well as unusual objects and materials to trace the lines, paradigms and distortions of life in a broad visual field. Again and again, an alter ego takes the place of the artistic self-image and the symbolic is expressed in the use of associatively charged materials and everyday objects. Isolated and decontextualised, they become both moving and absurd actors in a theatre with a strange dramaturgy.

In addition to works from around twenty years of artistic production, the newly created room installation ‘From the hand to the wall’ is the centrepiece of the exhibition. It is based on countless letters that the artist’s father, who had fled the GDR, received from his family between 1961 and 1971. In these texts, family history becomes world history and world history is transformed into a mirror of family relationships in the German-German reality before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Axel Anklam (1971 – 2022) is a sculptor known for his abstract, organically shaped, light-flooded sculptures. In his works, he combines classic and contemporary materials – hard materials such as stainless steel and innovative materials such as glass fibre-reinforced plastic, epoxy resin and carbon. With his profound knowledge of static and musical-rhythmic laws Anklam combines weightlessness, transparency and mass in his sculptures in a fascinating way. The translucent sculptures are based on impressions of landscapes, in particular mountain worlds and the dynamics of winds. He expanded his artistic repertoire to include titanium-coated reliefs, which create an interplay of light and shadow in gold or black. The reflective surfaces create a three-dimensional space that encourages reflection on the self, life and the interactions between light, form and nature. These ideas also characterise his art-in-building projects realised with Thomas Henninger, such as Solaris at the TU Bergakademie Freiberg or Music at the Berlin-Spandau music school.

Axel Anklam (* 1971 in Wriezen, † 2022 in Berlin) trained as a blacksmith from 1987 to 1990 and became a master blacksmith in 1993. From 1998 to 2001, he studied sculpture at Burg Giebichenstein in Halle and continued his studies from 2002 to 2006 at the Berlin University of the Arts, where he was a master student of Tony Cragg.

Curated by Dr Karin Rase and Christiane Bühling-Schultz with Nadja Anklam.