Solo Exhibition: The Pregnant Man

The Pregnant Man

On the occasion of the inauguration of Michael Müller’s new studio, the exhibition The Pregnant Man provides an insight into two new bodies of works by the artist. The group of works Himmelheber deals with artifacts of a fictitious indigenous tribe and their supposed exploration. The focus is on sculptures reminiscent of fetishes of ritual actions. For many hours, the artist cooks a paste of blood, bone meal, hair, urine and sperm to make different black mask-like objects from it. These masks are an integral part of the “Himmelheber ceremonies” that deal with sexuality, death and spirituality. Sexuality, death and the belief in a higher power are important pillars in every culture that form an identity.

By confronting the recipients with a foreign, diametrically opposed culture, Michael Müller invites them to draw conclusions about our own culture and identity. At the same time, he points out the difficulty of giving up our Eurocentric view and thus disregarding our evaluation criteria. This aspect becomes clear in the drawings and collages of the work Die Buchstaben der Psyche [The Letters of Psyche] (2018), which was inspired by the ideas of the writer and ethnographer Hubert Fichte. Fichte’s sociological observations and ethnological studies, which led him in the 1970s in several South American countries, the Caribbean and Africa, are “misused” by Müller and applied to the “Himmelheber culture”. The sometimes pseudo-scientific approach Fichtes’ is thus led to absurdity in Müller’s work. Above all, it is our ethics, morality and legal interpretation that stand in the way of dealing with a culture that has developed independently and is supposedly more primitive. The exhibition will be expanded in the series Reproduktion von Frühwerken [Reconstruction of Early Works].

The work Hoover Generation Future Smart Pure White & Luxor Black / Smokey Gray Transparent (2018) can be regarded as an important link between the two bodies of works shown. Three plexiglass display cases stacked on top of each other, illuminated inside neon tubes, each contain a reclining sculptural object encased in the same paste from which “Himmelheber artefacts” were made. In its structure and execution, the work is reminiscent of works by Jeff Koons from the 1980s. Instead of commercial vacuum cleaners, which raises Koons in Duchamps manner to Readymades and thus to works of art, one is inclined to attest Michael Müller the attempt to get rid of the readymade in favor of a spiritually and emotionally charged expression. Rather, Müller is concerned with revealing our approach to art. A ritual object experiences the change from object to exhibit in museum practice. The actual function of the object is negated and he is awarded the aura of an art object.

Here, the connecting meta-level in Müller’s œuvre becomes clear: his artistic exploration can always be considered from the perspective of artistic possibilities, their presentation and their degree of impact. For example, Michael Müller examines the medial borderline of painting in the 5 works on display, Vor und Hinter dem Glas [In front and behind the glass]. The colored frame and the painted frame glass combine with the processed canvas. The individual elements and levels thus achieve equality and merge into a picture.

This approach is symbolic and symptomatic of all of Müller’s work. Like the individual picture elements and image levels, different themes, media and groups of works merge into a superordinate design that focuses on both the diversity of art and of man.