Press Release
Reinhard Mucha
Mucha – WICHTIG LEBEN !
Exhibition at nw9
March 1 - October 18, 2024
Neue Weyerstraße 9
50676 Cologne
“I think people misunderstand [Roy] Lichtenstein; the early work with the crying woman was his wife, who was schizophrenic. I think his work was actually emo@onal. So even though you fight against it ... and minimal ar@sts and conceptual ar@sts seem to fight against emo@onal issues, I think you shouldn’t be afraid of them. [...] On the other hand, being Jewish, I think humor is extremely important.”
(Dan Graham in an interview with the “Louisiana Channel,” 2017)
In an interview with Kunsforum International in 1987, Harald Szeemann regretted Reinhard Mucha’s absence from documenta 8, since there was “somewhere a mysterious corner” in his work that he considered important. Moreover, according to the legendary curator, Mucha’s work is “formally insanely good and at the same time doubly and triply ambiguous.” Thus, Mucha was once again notoriously underexposed, as many of the reviewers of his major retrospective at the Kunstsammlung NRW, Der Mucha – An Initial Suspicion (September 3 – January 22, 2023), noted in one way or another. Hans-Jürgen Hafner rhetorically asks who under the age of fifty has ever even heard of Mucha and assumes that the artist probably prefers to go about his business in his studio on Kölner Straße in Düsseldorf instead of exhibiting at every bus stop like many of his colleagues. Martin Kippenberger once said that he did his thing radically, and that was exactly the point. It is therefore all the more gratifying to now be able to discover, get to know, or revisit Reinhard Mucha’s works in a cabinet exhibition at Cologne’s nw9, Mucha – WICHTIG LEBEN !, on view from March 2 to October 18, 2024.
Haptics, habits, humor—the old Federal Republic of Germany “after 1945”—as a post- traumatic psychogram, if you will. Fanned out in the pool of its colors, surfaces, and material qualities, and then neatly pieced together into assemblages. This is the formula which sums up what Reinhard Mucha, born in Düsseldorf in 1950, does with his “model building.“ The potential of the matter is his raw material, the potential to radiate neuralgic emotional states with a sculptural frequency all its own. Filing cabinets, index card boxes, historical furniture— for Mucha, not “snows of yesteryear,” not “the end of the story” (from the arsenal of his titles), but the beginning of his own new arrangements, reconfigured and thus abstracted. Freed from the original functional context of everyday life, in which they have served their purpose, literally cut free, things—such as footstools (!), ordinary flooring, and zinc tubs, as well as advertisements, magazines, transistor radios, soccer balls, and ballet slippers (his daughter’s) or even testimonies, and, last but not least, idioms—become the building blocks for mostly sculptural formal inventions that stand for themselves, namely as art. Wood, sheet metal, felt—all these are allowed to open up to new contexts, freed from the white space of the gallery and often reflecting it behind panes of glass. In the mode of “latency”—in Mucha’s “history and memory boxes” (Hans-Jürgen Hafner), neuralgic and nostalgic elements are always firmly bolted in place, but never nailed down, for example to an explicit meaning. They are associative docking stations, which—with Mucha’s fascination for the railroad in mind— can be coupled in many ways, always in two directions: on the one hand, with the stations of his own biography, which he exhibits pars pro toto as exemplary, and on the other hand with art historical milestones, especially since the 1960s, which he appropriates precisely. These include axiomatic achievements, such as the legacy of Marcel Duchamp, i.e. the significance of even the choice of an object, as well as the unconditional belief in the narrative power of the material à la Joseph Beuys, the expansion of the artistic field through conceptual art, and the stock of forms of minimalism. Mucha deconstructs this pool of ideas into its component parts, as he does with other materials, in order to then reintegrate individual components into the work—transformed with his assistance. For example, he recodes the formal language of minimal art, its clean self-referentiality, into a display of individual experience. In typical Mucha fashion, this display character then becomes his subject again, to which he adds footnotes of self-reflection, for example when he “shows” works in works as inserts, thus thematizing the exhibition itself through their co-exhibition.
With Beuys’s expanded concept of art in mind, Mucha can be credited with his very own expansion of the concept of sculpture. He incorporates “sculpture” into a broad network of references—for example, the assemblage Uelzen, on view at nw9, into the Deutsche Bahn railroad network, making it imaginatively mobile and literally electrifying it with fluorescent tubes.
What else can be expected at nw9 in Cologne? Let’s do what Mucha himself would do and take a look at the linguistic material of the graphic editions on display, rearrange it, push it together, restructure it—then we’ll know: CULTURE, LET’S GO, WE CAN DO IT! SCULPTURE AS A SET OF BUILDING BLOCKS—DISCOVER MORE! And, this too: LIVE IMPORTANTLY ! *
Text: Jens Bülskämper, art critic
* KULTUR, AUF-GEHT’S, WIR SCHAFFEN DAS! SKULPTUR ALS BAUSATZ – ENTDECKEN SIE MEHR! ... WICHTIG LEBEN !
contact
nw9 is open Fridays from 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. and by appointment.
For appointments, please contact info@nw9.space.
nw9
Kunstraum der Stiftung Kunstwissenschaft Köln
Neue Weyerstraße 9
50676 Köln