Michael Müller – Difficult Paintings

The exhibition Michael Müller – Difficult Paintings at Hasenheide 13 focuses exclusively on the artist’s painterly work for the first time.

At the center of the exhibition is the seven-part, large-format series Difficult Paintings, in which Müller explores the possibilities of abstraction in the twenty-first century while simultaneously processing various tendencies of non-objective painting from the past century.

The works are diptychs, which consist of two wings of different lengths. Müller begins to develop his painting on one of the two wings, which is then captured photographically in the next step—partially edited via Photoshop—and printed onto the other, still empty canvas. Both the photographic base and the original are further painted over, so that the image sections, which were almost identical at one point, remain largely hidden from the viewer.

In the publication accompanying the exhibition, Larissa Kikol describes this approach as an “anachronistic condensation of different timelines in the same pictorial moment,” in which “the original is replaced as the first idea” through the painterly further processing.