Bildwelten im Echo

Gerhard Kurt Müller and Classical Modernism

20/07/—26/10/25

 

Gerhard Kurt Müller with Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, Kasimir Malewitsch, Ljubow Popowa, Nadeschda Udalzowa

 

This exhibition attempts to demonstrate artistic affinities between the oeuvre of Gerhard Kurt Müller (1926–2019 Leipzig) and Classical Modernism.

 

Müller’s engagement with Classical Modernism evoked an artistic echo in his work, which the exhibition explores. Fernand Léger’s „tubular figures,“ composed of voluminous cylinders and spheres, certainly served as a landmark for Müller in art history. Formal-aesthetic borrowings from Cubism can be discovered in his later work. Müller felt a particular attraction to the crystalline, pointed, and brittle elements of Cubism. Geometric abstraction, cubic rhythm, simultaneity, and the limitation of the color palette influenced his own work. Yet his works developed a life of their own, developing an independent and distinctive expressiveness.

 

The human figure was always at the center of Müller’s work. It experienced the threat to human existence. Müller often chose historical figures. He painted against indifference and forgetfulness. Again and again, he depicted perpetrators and victims of a militarized world. Müller constructed his multifaceted, tectonically structured images through lengthy processes. He reduced the plot to its essentials and largely dispensed with a narrative progression. With great formal rigor, he pressed his figures onto flat pictorial stages. Often, a particular color scheme dominated: cold blue and white, bright red and white, radiant yellow, or warm orange and brown.

 

His figures appear three-dimensional, seeming to emerge from the canvases in a tangible way with their relief-like physicality. Thus, the formal vocabulary logically unfolded into three-dimensional space. The first wooden sculptures began to emerge in 1973. Stele-like, monolithic figures, mostly life-size or larger than life, stand in space with their fully rounded physicality. In painting and sculpture, Müller’s symbolic figures became expressively heightened symbols, which he made into representatives of certain types in times of peril.

 

A collaboration with the GERHARD-KURT-MÜLLER-FOUNDATION Leipzig