PRESENTATION: Ulrike Müller-Monument to My Paper Body

Ulrike Müller engages relationships between signification and bodies, and a concept of painting that is not restricted to brush and canvas. Employing a wide range of materials and techniques including performance, publishing, and textiles, her work moves between different contexts and publics, invites collaboration, and expands to other realms of production in processes of exploration and exchange. Müller studied art at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria, and participated in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Ludwig Forum Aachen Archive

The point of departure for the New York-based artist Ulrike Müller’s exhibition “Monument to My Paper Body” was the invitation to conceive a site-specific intervention for the two walls that face each other in the Ludwig Forum Aachen, each nine meters in width and fourteen meters in height. Her murals “Paper Body (ghost)”, and “Paper Body (pointer)”, both 2023, are temporary monumentalizations of two small-scale collages, which, enlarged to the scale of the architecture, were transferred to the wall as abstract colored forms, partly applied using a sponge technique. A selection of collages, a group of enamel miniatures, a fabric pattern developed for the exhibition, and the architectural model of the museum together set in motion a complex play with scale relationships and translations between materials. This continues in the adjoining rooms: the labyrinthine graphic cabinets and the galleries on the ground floor, where one can see the artist’s monotypes and large-scale carpet works together with works from the collection. “Monument to My Paper Body” presents the variety of painterly and spatial strategies with which Ulrike Müller has, over the past years, crossed over between her own production context in the studio and public exhibition and education formats. In the process, forms and materials from the repertoire of art history encounter references drawn from daily life and the so-called applied arts, establishing a notion of painting beyond brush and canvas. Besides the two murals, collages, monotypes, drawings, textile and enamel works by the artist are on display. In the graphic cabinets on the museum’s lower floor, 198 vector drawings, diagrams of the colored pencil drawings Ulrike Müller has been producing since 2010, constitute a continuous frieze, interrupted in 21 places by individual paintings executed in enamel on steel. These provide insights into the development of motif and color constellations, while the frieze offers an inventory of formations and repetitions. Within the scope of her artistic activity, Ulrike Müller has repeatedly engaged with curatorial projects. The undoing of seemingly established categories, role or genre attributions, but also of art and collection histories in favor of ambivalences, instabilities and counter-proposals, as well as an interrogation of gaps and interstices, are of special interest. This is exemplified by her reacting to the invitation for a solo exhibition with Herstory Inventory. 100 Feminist Drawings by 100 Artists, 2012, project for which she presented other artists’ works in an installation of her design, and in interventions in the collections at mumok in Vienna the mumok Collection, 2021). For the exhibition, Ulrike Müller jointly with the curator has curated a presentation in three gallery spaces in which her own works enter into dialogue with selected works from the collections. Taken out of their art-historical framing, familiar and less often viewed holdings from the collections are rearranged along the lines of Müller’s investigations, methodologies, and fields of interest. “Monument to My Paper Body” shifts the concept of the monumental. The logic of claiming significance through enlargement encounters fragility, temporality and the open nature of Ulrike Müller’s collages made from scraps of paper. The collection body, the body of her paper works, as well as the bodies of viewers moving through the exhibition spaces are placed in a dynamic field in which size relationships, value constellations and agency appear as questions.

With works by: Carla Accardi, Laurie Anderson, Belkis Ayón, Lygia Clark, Nancy Graves, Alex Hay, Alfred Jensen, Bertram Jesdinsky, Jasper Johns, Imi Knoebel, Christopher Knowles, Svetlana Kopystiansky, Sol LeWitt, Lee Lozano, Rune Mields, Klaus Paier, Margit Palme, Judy Pfaff, Robert Rauschenberg, Dorothea Rockburne, Miriam Schapiro, Peter Young, and Fahr El-Nissa Zeid.W

Photo: Ulrike Müller, Miniatures, 2014, © Ulrike Müller, Courtesy the artist and Ludwig Forum Aachen

Info: Curator:  Birkenstock, Assistant Curator:  Mailin Haberland, Ludwig Forum Aachen, Jülicher Straße 97–109, Aachen, Germany, Duration: 9/12/2023-9/6/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 10:00-17:00, Thu 10:00-20:00, https://ludwigforum.de/