______
The Far Side II
Fondation CAB, St. Paul de Vence, 2023
The Far Side II, 2023
Two-Person Exhibition with Christoph Meier*
The artistic practices of Ute Müller and Christoph Meier can be defined as conceptual yet material, procedural and interdisciplinary, always as a platform that takes on a spatial dimension. Each image, each object, with which these two practices can be associated, always thinks along the social spaces in which they are shown or which they generate. Their artistic work never ended at the studio door, but has always expanded into the spaces of distribution, publication or consumption, seeking collaboration in a wide variety of contexts. For them, taking detours has always been a most constructive credo.
The Far Side II - including new works produced in St Paul de Vence - is the second installment of a body of works first shown at Komagome SOKO in Tokyo in 2022. As the art critic Stuart Munro stated, "The Far Side touches upon geology and the anthropomorphic, making something in service of something else''. At the Fondation CAB Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Ute Müller paintings unfold as a wide container of references in painting. Placed between abstraction and figuration, her canvases refer to a condition Philip Guston described as the ambiguity of paint being image and image being paint. A similar strategy can be found in the objects of Christoph Meier which also work in two referential directions. On the one hand, these hooks of burnt Viennese clay reflect upon their function as mounts for and through sculpturally approaching the format of painting. On the other hand, they painterly refer to those times when these terraces have been shaped by hands and horses.
(Fig.1-12)
Eggtempera on canvas, à 40 x 30 cm
* Ceramics by Christoph Meier
______