EIGHTEEN EXHIBITIONS: TEIL 33. NACHLASS ZU LEBZEITEN: MICHAEL MÜLLER

Galerie Thomas Schulte presents from April 29 to June 24, 2017 two parallel exhibitions Teil 18. Die Welt gibt es nicht! and Teil 33. Nachlass zu Lebzeiten by Michael Müller. The two exhibitions constitute the finale of a four year cycle Eighteen Exhibitions, which started in April 2013 and which in the end will consist of overall 33 exhibitions and 4 performances.

In its recent iteration, the comprehensive solo exhibition Skits – 13 Exhibitions in 9 Rooms at the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden from November 2016 to February 2017, the cycle was summarised and continued. Now Teil 18. Die Welt gibt es nicht! and Teil 33. Nachlass zu Lebzeiten with due expenditure bring the cycle to an end – an exceptional and exuberant (perhaps programmatically preliminary) oeuvre. The cycle follows a certain order and chronology, in which various themes are approached almost scientifically and translated artistically. With these final exhibitions, the artist‘s attention is directed to the significant qualities of his own work. Between the works presented, clusters are formed, which can be regarded as pillars of the artist’s work. Teil 33. Nachlass zu Lebzeiten is probably Michael Müller‘s most personal exhibition. During the final act, the artist reconsiders the essential questions in which the drawings, the idea of the window and the principle of the map play an important role.

The exhibition title Teil 33. Nachlass zu Lebzeiten is a reference to the title of a novel by Robert Musil whose Man Without Qualities stood at the beginning of Michael Müller’s cycle as a central point of reference. (Ulrich, the Man Without Qualities, decides to take one year leave from his life in order to find an occupation adequate for his skills.) The two parallel exhibitions bring together a multitude of heterogeneous works including Die Anderen, a series of formally diverse plaster sculptures resembling heads, and a series of drawings inspired by the act of reading Jacques Derrida’s Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question – and finally several works, which at the very end of the cycle reach back to the very beginning: to the artist’s earliest works.