Wolfgang Müller - Galerie Requisite

The Konschthal Esch will be showing the first comprehensive exhibition outside of Germany of the work of the artist, musician and author Wolfgang Müller. For the first time, this project brings together key works from his various creative endeavours, from the Punk Art group Die Tödliche Doris to his activities as a ‘misunderstanding scientist’ whose multi-facetted practice questions established hierarchies.

In the 1980s, Wolfgang Müller (b. 1957 in Wolfsburg, Germany) founded the legendary West Berlin group Die Tödliche Doris together with his fellow student Nikolaus Utermöhlen. The work of ‘Doris’, a fictional female character who materialised in music but also in photography, film, video, performance and literature, revolved around questions of artistic identity and recognisability, which were playfully and methodically undermined through constantly changing formats.

In the same vein, Müller’s work since the group’s planned dissolution in 1987 has been frustrating the audience’s expectations regarding the artist’s ‘signature style’ by strategically eluding any formal or conceptual categorisation. Through seemingly unlikely associations, the ‘reverse conceptualist’ (Diedrich Diederichsen) probes familiar categories such as nature, nation, history, society, sexuality or metaphysics and their ingrained presumptions.

Recurring themes in Müller’s personal mythology are Iceland and ornithology, which in his records, radio plays, installations, performances and publications combine with amber and shellac, Nordic mythology, titmouse fat balls, the German liberal party FDP or Icelandic transvestites. All these different elements are treated as confusingly abstract materials whose shrewd interplay forms a body of work characterised by curiosity, criticism and humour, in which art and reality merge in unexpected ways.

As author and editor, Müller has published the influential chronicles Geniale Dilletanten (1982) and Subkultur Westberlin 1979–1989. Freizeit (2013), in which he offers a knowledgeable and witty insider’s perspective on the West Berlin art scene before the fall of the Wall (1989).