Ulrike Müller

Hoffman Donahue is pleased to present Walkthrough, its inaugural solo exhibition with the Austrian artist Ulrike Müller. This site-specific presentation centers on Müller’s enamel-on-steel paintings, situating them within a timeline that physically spans the exhibition space, back office, and stairwell, documenting the conceptual and formal evolution of these works over the past 15 years.

Drawing is a generative core of the artist’s practice. From colored pencil sketches, Müller makes paintings in vitreous enamel, powdered glass fused to steel in a furnace. She later documents these compositions in digital vector diagrams, translating them into a technical vernacular.

Walkthrough extends an installation strategy that Müller developed at Ludwig Forum in Aachen, Germany, where her enamel-on-steel paintings hung atop an extended frieze of vector line drawings, wheat-pasted directly onto gallery walls. As curator Eva Birkenstock observed, “[this format offers] insights into the development of motifs and color constellations, charting formations and repetitions in a visual chronology,” allowing viewers to encounter both the finished paintings and the guiding, iterative processes usually concealed by such works.

At Hoffman Donahue, Müller adds another layer: large forms sponge-painted onto the gallery walls. Since 2012, murals have been increasingly central to the artist’s exhibitions, actively shaping how paintings are experienced. “I work a lot with transfers from one format, context, or material to another,” says Müller. “The starting point is always working with color and form, or, in compositional terms, with figure, ground, and frame.”

Ulrike Müller (b. 1971, Austria) lives and works outside Vienna. She studied art at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria, and participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program, New York. In 2022 she co-curated the exhibition The Animal Within – Creatures in (and outside) at the mumok Collection in Vienna, Austria. She has held solo exhibitions at Sylvia Kouvali, London, UK (2025); Ludwig Forum, Aachen, Germany (2023), Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna, Austria (2023); Vielmetter, Los Angeles, CA (2022); Callicoon Fine Arts, New York (2021 and 2016); The Galleries at Moore, Moore College of Art & Design, Philadelphia, PA (2019); Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany (2018); mumok - Museum Moderner Kunst, Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, Austria (2015) and the Brooklyn Museum, New York (2012), among others. Selected group exhibitions include Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, curated by Lynne Cooke, LACMA, Los Angeles, California (2023); The Venice Biennale (2019); The Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA (2018); Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon, New Museum, New York (2017); and The Whitney Biennial, New York (2017).

She is the editor of Work the Room. A Handbook on Performance Strategies (OE/b_books, 2006), organized and co-edited Herstory Inventory: 100 Feminist Drawings by 100 Artists (Dancing Foxes Press, 2014), and was co-editor of the queer feminist art journal LTTR from 2005–2008.

Müller’s work is in the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; mumok, Vienna; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Tiroler Landesmuseen, Innsbruck; and the Museum of Applied Arts (MAK), Vienna.