Thinking about Painting

gdm Taipei presents the solo exhibition Thinking about Painting, featuring the series of paintings bearing the same title in German. Denken zu Malerei (Thinking about Painting) reflects an introspective process: one that questions intentions and interpretations. Through a diverse array of painterly techniques, it investigates the friction between the painted image and the physical limits of the canvas, to challenge long-held assumptions about what a painting is—and what it can become.

After a period of 20 years devoted to drawing, Michael Müller’s return to painting in 2014 was inspired by an indomitable urge to counteract the conventional idea of framing. The material sensitivity, large dimensions and irregular forms of his drawings required special framing for protection. It is precisely this restriction that drew Müller back into painting, to question new possibilities of shaping a relationship between the image and the space surrounding it. In 2017, the artist began experimenting with painting on layers of glass atop a base of canvas or aluminum in his series Vor und hinter dem Glas (In Front of and Behind the Glass), transforming the material from a passive protective layer into an active painting surface, and allowing, guiding and blocking the viewer’s gaze. This multi-layered approach produces both a virtual depth through color and form, as well as a physical one, generated by the reflections of the glass, the shadows of the brushstrokes, and the viewer’s own positioning in relationship to the work. In his new series Denken zu Malerei, he takes this approach even further.
 
Each work in Denken zu Malerei consists of one or two canvases encircled by alu-dibond panels, meticulously cut out to resemble ‘passe-partouts’, completed with aluminum frames. Traditionally the passe-partout, a mediating structure between image and frame, serves to cover the edge of an image, where decisions, repairs, uncertainties, or the materiality of the image support becomes visible. In Denken zu Malerei, this boundary becomes a site for activation; Müller intentionally supersedes the framing edge to construct an ‘open image architecture’, in which the border does not mean disappearance, but form.

Conceptually, the creative process in Denken zu Malerei—and especially in the two works Einwirkung (Effect) (2021) and Schriftstück (Document) (2022–2025) where the pencil notes are still partially visible—begins with the one or two canvases that are composed and painted by the artist. The resulting paintings are photographed and printed on A3 or A4 paper, not filling the sheet but leaving white space. The artist then notes there his thoughts on the respective work as well as questions that occurred to him while painting in order to integrate this thinking into the work in the steps that follow—through writing and painting. The central question is where a painting begins and where it ends, whether it finds its uncrossable boundary at the edge of the canvas.

In the following step, the canvases are placed in a frame along with the alu-dibond panels. In Einwirkung, the artist then transferred his notes word-for-word with a pencil to the white alu-dibond panels, whereby an imprint of the canvas had been applied to the right-hand panel as an acetone transfer print, so that the work of art “quotes” itself in a sense. In the case of Die Sache selbst (The Thing Itself) (2021), by contrast, the left canvas had been printed with elements from earlier painted works and then partially covered with paint. Only in the uncovered areas where the unpainted canvas remained visible is the printing recognizable. Forms resulting from these uncovered areas were simulated on the right-hand canvas by the artist painting them—reversed into the negative—especially in red. For Die Sache selbst als selbst Erscheinende (The Thing Itself as Self-Appearing) (2021), Müller used a computer to collage and modify a photographic reproduction of the painted canvas, emphasizing single elements and overlapping others. The result of this digital manipulation was printed widely on the left-hand alu-dibond panel. Whereas Die Sache selbst was restricted to quoting previously created works of art by printing on the canvas and commenting artistically on them, Die Sache selbst als selbst Erscheinende comments in a visual language on the canvas painting belonging to the finished work of art itself: the commentary on the work of art is integrated into the work itself.

The series Denken zu Malerei represents the effort to eliminate post hoc a predetermined delimitation and restriction of the artistic process of painting—namely, the size of the canvas—by extending the image and painting surface and turning the “passe-partout” itself, which actually frames and delimits the picture area, into the painting’s ground and thus raises the fundamental question of the finiteness and infiniteness of painting. Which decisions did the artist make in the limited space of a canvas, which painterly possibilities or alternatives did he decide against, which did he discard in order to be able to realize others and bring them visually into the painting—and in what form are the absences still present in the finished work?