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Ute Müller

Künstlerhaus - Halle für Kunst und Medien, Graz 2017

→Link Künstlerhaus - Halle für Kunst und Medien   

    Ambivalence as a stance and impetus in seeking form and anti-form play a decisive role for Ute Müller: be it casts of negative forms of almost recognizable objects or arrangements of found, easy-to-change, and thus differently charged things. The artist makes comprehensible the process of formation; she varies materials and combines references without allowing anything specific to be missed when grappling with form, idea, and presentation. The categories of space and time are vital for the artist.

    In her sculptures and spatial installations, Ute Müller also remains faithful to her discreet and restrained color palette. Allusions, smudging, and overpainting are situated adjacent to wellcontoured forms and clearly emerging visual symbols. The artist varies her painterly vocabulary, yet allows previously created material to be repeated, or—subjected to subtle manipulations—to reappear in a different guise. It is with the dampened chromaticity of gray and blue shades that she evidences the temporal process underlying her work. Spatiality is fostered by the overlaying of thin layers of paint. The individual paint layers differ in their intensity; they are superimposed and thus evoke a sense of spatial depth. As such, painterly markings spectrally emerge at times from below.

    It is noticeable how she invokes a conceptually set language of form. The shapes she selects appear again and again, in different states, both in the paintings and the sculptures. Forms from her paintings reemerge in various sculptures. By implementing different materials and their specific qualities, the artist succeeds in eliciting changes in perception, often of a very subtle nature. Plaster molds stand next to glass, rough surfaces lend emphasis to the tactile qualities of the material, and mirroring effects underscore the changes on the visual level.

    The mediums of painting and sculpture thus meet and make connections. Forms remain engrained in memory and become memory pictures that reappear elsewhere as visual symbols. The impulse to decode the language of form employed by Müller illustrates how her works have a linguistic dimension that can immerse the beholder in action. Thus a sense of activation is set in motion that counters contemplative reception. Ute Müller’s exhibition becomes a place of possible activity.

(Fig.1-15)
- Plaster, steel, brass, latex, wax, acrylic glass, bronze, aerated concrete,
various dimensions
- Egg tempera on canvas, à 200 x 150 cm

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