Michael Müller: Mögliche und unmögliche Bilder

The work Mögliche und unmögliche Bilder #I [Possible and Impossible Images #1] (2022) deconstructs Richter’s Birkenau cycle. Without seeking a direct comparison between two painters (Richter vs. Müller), i.e. without pursuing Richter's proposition of individual pictorial abilities and personal limits as a condition for the possibility of painting each picture, Richter's initial question of whether everything is in basically paintable or representable is instead pursued by using Richter's aesthetics to investigate what different works of art can achieve. From the fundamental freedom of art, grounded in its aesthetic essence, Müller derives ethical considerations of artistic modes of representation and procedure that were left out by Richter, who confines himself only to the immanence of art: While art can devote itself to anything and take on any subject, paint and show anything, can it also achieve anything? Is it possible to visualize an empathetic picture of the Holocaust? In the totality of its inhuman, absolute and total power of destruction, in its urge to destroy even the last trace of its existence?

For this investigation, the layers of paint of Richter’s Birkenau images were uncovered and questioned according to their respective expressiveness: as the lower, later concealed layer, the pictorial figurative reproductions of the four photographs of the extermination process of the European Jews taken from the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp—added by the wiping technique typical of Richter, which veils what is depicted and yet allows it to be recognized. The second level is formed by the abstract overpaintings, the streaks and stripes drawn with a squeegee—a technique that allows chance into the painting process and is considered unreproducible. But even the supposed randomness and arbitrariness are results of artistic decisions that are reproducible, as the digital prints of Richter’s works on aluminum in the Reichstag show. Installed side by side on four walls of the exhibition space of the Museum im Kulturspeicher, surrounding the visitors, it is up to them to decide what can be painted and shown at all—what each of the works on view shows in an individual way.

In this exhibition, the answer to the question, however, is clear: everything can be painted and shown, but nothing represents what is ethically appropriate. There is no picture that universally and completely shows the world, but every image takes up a position and must relate to the world, to what it shows. Even the documentary images, the photographs taken from the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, for all the authenticity of the place and events seen in them, their indisputable testimony, are not complete, but excerpted, selective, perspectival—and it is precisely through this that they gain their necessity, significance and dignity. 

The blind spots that can be seen on them and the absence that can be guessed at, which is just not shown, distinguish their humanity and uniqueness.