Ulrike Müller

Vielmetter Los Angeles is excited to present On Edge New York-based artist Ulrike Müller’s first solo show in Los Angeles.

Comprised of vitreous enamel paintings on steel, textiles, paper collages, monotypes, and painted walls, Müller extends the pictorial space of the exhibition beyond the gallery into communal areas and onto the outside walls of the building—presenting an ambitious array of recent work where the intimate becomes customary, and the pedestrian becomes sensual.

Through a multi-faceted artistic practice spanning curating, publishing, and public murals, the Austrian-born artist’s image-making takes apart the symbolic signage of our collective histories—slicing, cutting, zooming, edging, remixing, coloring, and abutting in unforeseeable ways, infusing amusement and tenderness at each turn and producing a manifold of visual reform.

On view in the exhibition is a group of recently completed monotypes created through a painterly printmaking technique that combines indexical marks and the collaging of previously printed papers into unique works. Accompanying the monotypes is a group of smaller paper collages, each entitled Instrumentarium, in a nod to cassettes of 18th-century surgical instruments. Both groups of works exemplify the artist’s toolbox of varying forms, textures, and tones in kinetic compositions that set in motion meaning and figuration. By breaking down traditional assemblies and binary systems these investigational works on paper provoke us to reexamine the motives and means of visual communication.

Continuing the artist's exploration of relationships between abstraction and the body through painterly modalities that are not limited to brush and canvas is a group of enamel-on-steel paintings. Materially connected to industrial sign making, and to histories of hygiene and jewelry, the works on view, each entitled Hinges, are finely honed, kiln-fired compositions of hard-edged forms and curvilinear contours.

Such animate, hybridized mannerisms are transferred throughout the entire exhibition appearing, for example, as flat creature-like shapes in rugs woven from local wool by Zapotec weavers in Mexico as well as in paint swaths of different grays onto some of the gallery’s walls. Appearing as if shadows of unknown origin had been cast on the building from outside they situate viewers in their own bodies and draw attention to perspectives that lie outside the framework of the gallery and this exhibition.

Ulrike Müller (born 1971, Austria) employs a wide range of materials and techniques, her work moves between different contexts and publics, invites collaboration, and expands to other realms of production in processes of exploration and exchange. A large mural by Müller, The Conference of Animals, was recently on view at The Queens Museum, New York. Solo exhibitions include those at The Galleries at Moore, Moore College of Art & Design, Philadelphia (2019), Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2018), mumok - Museum Moderner Kunst, Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna (2015), Callicoon Fine Arts, New York (2016, 2021), and the Brooklyn Museum (2012). Her work has been included in many significant group exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale (2019), the Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg (2018), Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon at the New Museum, New York, and the Whitney Biennial (2017). She recently co-curated The Animal Within—Creatures in (and outside) the mumok Collection at mumok and co-edited the eponymous publication (with Manuela Ammer). She is also the editor of Work the Room - A Handbook on Performance Strategies (OE/b_books, 2006), and she organized and co-edited Herstory Inventory - 100 Feminist Drawings by 100 Artists (Dancing Foxes Press, 2014). From 2005-2008 Müller was a co-editor of the queer feminist art journal Lttr. Müller's work is included in the following public collections and institutions: The Museum of Modern Art, NY; Museum Moderner Kunst, Stiftung Ludwig Vienna, Austria; MAK - Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. Müller currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.