“In painting, I search for what cannot be seen”

For the exhibition Fragmente der Zeit (Fragments of Time) at König Galerie, Michael Müller was visited in his studio: In a video interview, he candidly shares insights into his creative process and the philosophical underpinnings of his work. “What does an artist do?” he asks. “He sorts. He sifts out.” For Müller, the act of making art is not one of immediate clarity or ease. Rather, it is a long and often grueling negotiation between instinct and concept, desire and possibility, and the visible and the invisible.

This introspective conflict takes center stage in his new solo exhibition Fragmente der Zeit, where he further explores the ancient Greek myth of the Dioscuri through his paintings, building on his 2022 room-filling installation Der geschenkte Tag (The Given Day) at Frankfurt’s Städel Museum.

Müller does not illustrate events from the myth. Instead, he explores how stories can exist within abstraction. “Can you use abstraction to tell a story?” he asks. To him, abstraction is not the absence of narrative, but rather, its transformation. His paintings capture the tension between control and chance, intention and discovery. As he explains in the interview, “Sometimes the painting wants something different than I do.”

After nearly two decades away from painting—during which he was blocked by a conceptual prejudice against the medium—Müller experienced a profound shift. “It was like a dam inside me had burst,” he recalls. His return to painting was less a decision than a compulsion—a need to engage with color and surface in a way that could carry his ideas forward.

Video and images: © König Galerie