Claudia & Julia Muller: Popular Abstractions
Annet Gelink Gallery is proud to present the first solo exhibition in the Netherlands by Claudia & Julia Müller (Basel 1964/1965). The sisters started working together in the beginning of the nineties. Their work consists of murals, drawings on paper, aquarelles, collages and video animations. A major exhibition of their work is presented at the Kunstmuseum Thun, another will be opened later this year at the Grazer Kunstverein.
In their early work Claudia & Julia Müller used photographs of people from their private surrounding as a starting point for their drawings. Over the years public images have become an increasingly important source. A growing archive of images is put together of seemingly naive, everyday pictures collected from the media and libraries.
The artists are in search of the tension hidden underneath the everyday surface. "By drawing we interpret the representation anew, introduce new codes which function as a reading aid for that particular depiction of the everyday. Like the everyday, for example, which is always presented as being harmonious, whereas it is anything but, and constantly at the point of collapse." The re-drawing, copying, working with amateurish tools such as ball-point pens robs the images of their original beauty and gives them something uncanny, menacing.
Claudia & Julia Müller always work with groups or series of pictures. This has to do with the intention to deliberately confront the pictures with each other. On the other hand it also increases the impact of the pictures. Their work is structured in a dialectic way and proclaims a multiple point of view. Its strong communicative power towards the viewer is based on the process of communication between the artists and on the dialogue generated between the single images of a group.
Annet Gelink Gallery presents the video installation Couples: Persons, Animals, Saints. It consists of three computer animations projected on a wall partly covered by a mural depicting tree tops. There is a constant metamorphosis of appearing and disappearing persons, saints and animals. In these videos the plurality characteristic to the work of the artist duo is no longer realized through accumulation of pictures, but through the manipulation of the picture itself. By linking the different groups of motives a web of references is created that can be read in the most varied ways. "You never get a simple answer from us, for we do not show the world as it is. Some things remain vague, are not clarified but that is exactly what interests us." Next to the video installation we show the series "Party", a group of 12 new drawings and collages. They show people dancing or thrilled by party ambiance. A recurring theme in these works are pattern cuttings from newspaper. The technique of cuttings stem from the artists' childhood: "As children we used such cuttings for parties, for us it was a cheap but effective way to decorate a room." The abstract simple patterns express the same emotional value as the figurative motives. Their combination enlarges the frame of how they are depicted.
