ART CITIES:Zürich-Thomas Müllenbach

Thomas Müllenbach turns our everyday perception of familiar things on its head, and subverts the collective understanding of the sense, purpose and value of the visible. These shifts in the everyday are the focus of his attention. In the process, he also repeatedly scrutinizes the history of art and explores the possibilities of painting. The exhibition in Kunsthalle Zürich presents the first comprehensive overview of Thomas Müllenbach’s paintings and drawings with a focus on works created especially for this show and recent works, complemented by a selection of earlier works.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Kunsthalle Zürich Archive

Thomas Müllenbach’s interest is constantly aroused by the normal and familiar, be it a jug, a bunch of flowers, a flat screen monitor, the numerous exhibition flyers sent to him, a bank lobby or a bedroom. He does not merely reproduce these things and their surfaces in these works, but captures the everyday, almost imperceptible shifts associated with them and the accompanying moments of irritation. These are the motifs that refuse to leave him alone. When selecting details from images, he omits the apparently important element only to refer to it through a supposedly unimportant one. With his images, the artist presents the viewer with fragments, in which he refuses to follow the traditional conventions of representation, allows the edges of the image to crop heads and objects, and mixes different perspectives in one work so that the viewers can discover the unknown in the familiar, and the familiar is transformed into something uncanny. The drawing assumes an independent place in Müllenbach‘s oeuvre and offers practically unlimited scope for experimentation. A group of large-format works revolves around places in which state-of the- art technology is used and frequently fails. Illustrations from the daily press and specialist publications, from which he reproduces a detail, provide the template for these works. The watercolors, which are presented in a comprehensive space-encompassing installation, reflect their models in their size and motifs: ranging from Dürer to van Gogh, from national to international artists and from figurative subjects to abstract fields of color, these works play with the idea of recognisability. Müllenbach’s “half-originals” are neither plagiarized nor copied, they involve the individual interpretation of technical reproductions of works of art to form new works.

 

Info: Kunsthalle Zürich, Limmatstrasse 270, Zürich, Duration: 22/11/14–25/1/15, Days & Hours: Tue, Wed, Fri: 11:00-18:00, Thu: 11:00-20:00, Sat, Sun: 10:00-17:00, www.kunsthallezurich.ch