Work Series:
Painter’s Sticks, 2019–ongoing

The group of works Painter’s Sticks questions the role of the pictorial base for the constitution of a painterly work of art, a recurring theme in Michael Müller’s work. The ‘stirrers’, which at first glance appear to have been created casually during the process of working on paintings and are used for mixing colours, have in fact been meticulously painted. The deliberately chosen limitation of the size of the available pictorial base forces a precise composition of the application of paint, a concentration on essential pictorial elements necessary for understanding the work, and evokes associations with academic miniature painting, which demands high artistic technical skills. Through their random appearance and gesture of colour, however, they position themselves against the strictness of academic painting. At the same time, the Painter’s Sticks emancipate themselves from the restriction of pictorial space to the two-dimensionality of the flat canvas by presenting themselves as three-dimensional pictorial objects. The illusion of spatial depth, which has to be artificially created by artistic skill in two-dimensional paintings, is present in the pictorial objects through their multilateral application of paint, which appears abstract, but as a mimicry of a real stirrer is actually objective in the sense of an accurate reproduction.

The Painter’s Sticks deal with various transformation practices in artistic creation and the process of creating sublime aesthetic objects. Recalling Marcel Duchamp’s concept of the readymade, which elevates a found and industrially produced object to a work of art by placing it in an institutional context, Müller reverses the relationship: A work of art artificially produced, according to aesthetic criteria, appears as an imitation of an everyday, functional object. The stirrer, a technical tool on which paint is accidentally deposited in ordinary use and which is needed to produce a work of art as the aim of the creative process, is released from its function by being used as a pictorial base and itself is made into a work as the result of a painterly process. Through the resulting elevation to the aesthetically higher level of art, a detachement from the material value takes place, which stands in discrepancy to the market value of the final product. This transformation is underlined by the presentation in an acrylic glass box, which indicates the staging of a work of art and emphasizes the detachment of the object from its ordinariness—a staging that would be inappropriate for a mere painting tool that has to be taken and worked with, and which keeps the viewer at a distance from the artwork. In his series Gedanken der Alchemie [Thoughts of Alchemy], Müller deals with the theme of the magic wand used in occult practices and symbolizing the will of the user—in this case the artist—which describes the transformation of impure, lower matter—the stirrer—into a higher, purer element—the work of art. The alchemical transmutation finds a parallel in the supposedly simultaneous mental or psychic transformation of the adept or, in this case, the artist during the process, which is based on a blending of matter and spirit.