#2—Alex Müller

Art and Life

Marking the recent 80^th anniversary of VE day, here is a trilogy of texts which begins graveside that I wrote for a catalogue and various exhibitions of work by Berlin-based artist Alex Müller. The texts have been brought together here for the first time, although they were written with each other in mind. Together we explored the auto-fictional components of her practise which was then a first, although this theme has since been expanded upon. Oddly touching and disturbing biographical details and the impact of postwar social relations on ordinary lives in a divided Germany inspire her multifarious works. The artist’s solo exhibition ‘Alexandraplatz’ at ZAK—Zentrum für Aktuelle Kunst has been extended until 23 May 2025. Many thanks to the artist, Kunsthalle Nürnberg and her galleries Norbert Arns, Cologne and Haverkampf Leistenschneider, Berlin, who variously commissioned and first published the texts and provided images for this feature. Some copies of Alex Müller’s limited edition artist catalogue ‘Bis die Zeit vergeht’ are still available.

Alex Müller, Von der Hand an die Wand, 2025 (detail), 350 letters on cotton, foam, wood dimensions variable, Courtesy the artist and Haverkampf Leistenschneider, Berlin

(I)

brick walls and wild paths

Artist Alex Müller and I are standing next to her grandfather’s overgrown grave in East Berlin. The headstone is missing because the local council has earmarked the cemetery for closure and redevelopment. All the graves are now denuded of ‘eternal flame’ candles, posies and wreaths. Around us, once trimmed cypress hedges are spilling out of weed-infested plots, and pencil pines loom with unruly branches like wind-blown hair. Here and there birches are self-seeding in clumps. The wild is inexorably returning. It’s mid-January, so the air is crisp and the tips of our noses turn red. The artist is wearing a purple hand-knitted tea-cozy beanie with a pomp-pomp bigger than a grapefruit. Its color is jarring against the dark green tones and overcast gray of our surroundings. A solitary young man in emotional distress is the only other person wandering about in this place, redolent of a fading past. Memories are flooding back for the artist—I can tell because her head drops and her body takes on an odd shape to bear them.

The artist tells me that her grandfather was a German soldier in Field Marshall Rommel’s North African army during WWII. Shortly before the end of the war, her grandfather stepped on a landmine and came home missing half a leg.

‘He never talked about the war and he never went swimming again. He was ashamed. He would remain on the banks of a lake with his trousers on watching us.’ [At home] when he was sitting on the edge of the bed, with his prosthesis leaning against the chair opposite, he’d say “come and help me and tie up my prosthesis.” His leg was amputated from his right knee down. I always used all my strength to make sure it sat properly. ... One of his favorite things to do was to take me into his coal cellar to clean shoes. Opa always sat on the right-hand stool. He taught me that you have to spit on them and put some shoe polish to make them shine.’

The artist looks at me, and we both smile awkwardly at the macabre irony of this. ‘Shoes are still a big thing in my work.’ she added. ‘I hope it’s not too much that I’m bringing you here first. The last time I was here was with my father in 2018, two years before he died.’ Walking on, we have a stilted conversation about class and inherited trauma, the lasting effects of violence and emotional brutality—mutually disclosing intimate family details which usually remain non-verbalized by everyone involved. ‘I don’t think I could talk about any of this if he and my mother weren’t now both gone.’

The primary destination for our excursion is Wilhelmsruh, a village-like neighborhood which is formally part of the Pankow district in East Berlin. It’s now over three decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, but walking around the neighborhood it still feels like yesterday, even if budget retailers now occupying what was once no-man’s-land and new housing developments rub shoulders with architectural remnants of the Gründerzeit, Weimar Republic and former-GDR. Metal fences, street lighting, patchwork footpaths, concrete and ochre tones hint at all these bygone eras.

We reach the street next to an apartment house where her father’s family lived, which is located just a block—a mere two hundred metres—from where the Berlin Wall once was. ‘They didn’t get on my father and my grandfather,’ the artist continued. ‘The conflict between my grandfather and father was one reason that in 1961, at age seventeen, my father left his parents’ apartment one day without saying a word. My father wanted to be free.’ When the artist’s father made his dash towards an unknown future, crossing the border through barbed-wire between the then Soviet and French sectors of the dissected, battle-scarred city, the Berlin Wall was not yet the high security death trap with watch towers and tanks traps that it later became. The arbitrariness of the Wall’s jagged line through the city turned Wilhelmsruh geographically into an isolated enclave, a little triangle of land surrounded by the wall on most sides. The artist’s Oma never forgave her son for leaving, even after the reunification of the two Germanys decades later. As I listen to the artist summoning up family memories, I think of all the other conversations I’ve had with German friends about the postwar years, the emotional repression, the ongoing reckoning. The violent past asserts itself not just through monuments or state acts of remembrance or in bestseller history books with ominous typefaces and blood-red capital letters on their covers, but also around kitchen tables across generations. Inspired by the productively ambivalent, personalized inquiry entailed in Kirsty Bell’s haunting book ‘The Undercurrents—A Story of Berlin’ (2022) and walking the streets, I imagine the unrecorded lives of Berliners, those that have left traces and those that have not.

*

Though the artist now lives in Berlin, Alex Müller (born 1969) grew up in Düren, a small city between Cologne and Aachen, in West Germany. But every summer between 1971 and 1983, her parents packed her off alone to cross the cold-war border to Wilhelmsruh to visit her grandmother. Sometimes she took a plane as an unaccompanied minor on British Airways to West Berlin. There, her aunt picked her up and then delivered her into the custody of the GDR female guards at the border crossing on the iconic cold-war checkpoint on the Bornholmer Strasse bridge. She was just two and a half years old when she first made this annual trip. Her grandmother would await her on the other side in a Kneipe (the German equivalent of a local small pub) which no longer exists. Then they would catch a bus and tram home. For over a decade, the law forbade her father, a defector, to visit. But sometimes he would go back on the West side to the same place he crossed the border where a platform was built that allowed people to peer over the wall and wave to their friends and relatives on the East side. Most Germans had at least one family member or knew someone on the other side of the wall. Meanwhile, on the East side, people could not go anywhere near the wall unless they lived in the same street. There were police boxes even on the corners in Wilhelmsruh—‘they watched people’. In the eyes of the artist as a child, the GDR seemed like another, kinder world.

‘I enjoyed all those summers very much. People were modest. Consumerism didn’t dominate their lives like ours. It smelled of coal in the winters and two-stroke engines. Coming from the West and being in the East, I thought was like going back in time, living like people used to live, more simply. I enjoyed buying drawing paper from a local shop—the paper was all recycled, not like in the West, all bleached white... The local kids and I also took a cart around the neighborhood collecting paper, metal and bottles for recycling too. I was often in the bakery because my grandmother worked there. A woman in the bakery nicknamed me “West Schnecke” [West-sweetie-pie] Everybody called me that. She would say, “Ahh, here comes the West Schnecke. You’re here again for a visit? What can we offer you today?” Most of the time I chose the crumble bun. One day, I had the job of bringing home a big cake for everybody. But I tripped at the entrance door to the apartment block and planted my face in it just like in a slapstick film. Everyone was speechless...’

As we walk, the artist tells me more anecdotes about ordinary life in Wilhelmsruh in the omnipresent shadow of the Wall. In the family’s apartment block lived a man who smoked cigars and who had once been the owner of the entire property before being dispossessed. Then there was a woman who wore a muff even in mid-summer who would yell out of her window to the artist and other children and say, ‘You have to dress warmly, you brats, it’s cold! And don’t be so loud, I can’t sleep with all that noise!’ On the street the artist asks an older woman passing by if she is from the area and if she remembers the Schreber garden which the apartment block looked over and which once surrounded the adjacent towering relic of German expressionist architecture built in red brick. ‘I don’t remember the garden’ says the woman, ‘but there was a Nazis bunker there that was hard to get rid of.’ Memories of course vary and while our memories however flawed or partial are our own, we cling to them. The artist turns away and points down another street:

‘There was a very nice old cinema there. I went there at least two or three times a week, even when it was hot in summer. The best Russian and Czech children’s films were screened there. Once I when I was there, the Russian film “The Golden Horns” was playing. The cinema was full and when the scene of the dark forest came on, everyone in my row automatically held hands, even though we did not know each other. Only at the end of the film did we loosen this ‘hand band’. Never again have I experienced anything like it! A total covenant of security!’

We are both conscious of what is now known as Ostalgie, as being suspect. But what to do with fond memories of everyday life when they are framed by ideology, when memories and experience differ and a discomforting ambivalence remains? No one I know who grew up in East Germany doesn’t have the problem of reconciling the before and after, and many, the promise of the peaceful revolutionary known as Der Wende, with how things then turned out in people’s actual lives. No doubt conscious of this, the artist—a Wessi—keeps close to her own childhood impressions.

‘For me, going to East Germany was like a journey to a country from a silent movie. All those old unrenovated houses, the food in the Konsum without advertising, all basic and simply packaged. Everywhere there were queues of people in front of shops. This image of people lined up one behind the other. It was a foreign image to me. I loved taking the bus and underground to Alexanderplatz for ten Pfennigs... But above everything, there was this wall that could not be overlooked. It seemed endless to me and was stubbornly radical! For me, the wall was an entry into another faraway country! I didn’t understand why people had the idea of enclosing people like that. Back at home in West Germany, the Wall was a permanent topic, too. It was always about the concept of “freedom”.’

I have often read about families separated by the Berlin Wall, but until now gave little thought to the fact that the wall might not have been seen as a common enemy, as something arbitrarily imposed from outside and powers above, and however reluctantly, accepted, but as a constitutive part of a family psyche, in their heads, in their emotional lives, driving a wedge. This is what it meant for the artist:

‘For my family in the East, the Wall was, of course, always an issue, as they had lost my father from their point of view because of it. My grandmother expatriated from the GDR seven years before the Wall fell, because she was a pensioner and they were allowed to do that. Two years after the Wall fell, my grandmother moved back to Wilhelmsruh. She was homesick. When the Wall fell, it totally disrupted our family. My aunt and uncle saw themselves as losers of the unification because they could no longer pursue their jobs... Different political opinions clashed and, at some point, they could no longer talk to each other. I have no contact with my aunt and my two cousins who live here in Berlin.’

Before we leave Wilhelmsruh, the artist relates to me a story like a film scene that she says she will never forget. She remembers standing with her childhood girlfriend on the street looking at the wall and asking, “Would you like to come with me to the West?” After some thought, she answered, “Yes, but only for a day. Then I want to go back.”

*

Our excursion to Wilhelmsruh was occasioned by Alex Müller’s solo survey exhibition ‘Bis die Zeit vergeht’ (Until Time Runs Out, 2023) at Kunsthalle Nuremberg. The title which quotes lyrics of the band Spliff’s song Déjà vu (1982), suggested to me it might be fruitful to delve into the past. On the walk, I realized Alex and I share the experience of growing up feeling somewhat like misfits in working-class families—ones with no ambitions for us beyond getting some kind of training and a job. Certainly not that we might become an artist or a writer.

True to her sense of self and its origins, Müller’s work embraces all manner of jolly making. There is a natural flow between the craftiness, jam-making, gardening and textiles she busies herself with in everyday family life and the production of works of art. Among the latter are: moody enigmatic paintings often figurative or featuring hands, some painted with red wine or coffee; witty sculptures, some deploying frozen peas or repurposed domestic objects; as well as installations, performances, and video, including one of the artist sleeping (Die Still Gesundheit, The Quiet Health, 2001). All of these modes of expression and more formed a greater whole in the exhibition, which was unified not by medium but by egalitarian free-spiritedness.

Alex Müller, Der Handstrauss, 2020 ink on canvas, 98 x 78 c, Courtesy the artist and Haverkampf Leistenschneider, Berlin, Courtesy the artist and Haverkampf Leistenschneider, Berlin

Her work is about attempting, accepting failures or awkwardness and surrendering to a hands-on process, having flashes of personal insight that reach back to move forward, and trying again whatever the outcome. Observational, reflective, tangential and relational, there is a frank lack of pretence in her art, which evidences and encourages the notion of a free-floating imaginary. It is full of the resonances of friendships, gentle irony and off-kilter associations. It can change tone and mode of address and is unafraid of the intensely personal and emotional. Take, for instance, the explicitly biographical and intense cycle of works consisting of 107 drawings on a paper Vom Mähen zum Frieden (From Mowing to Peace, 2020). The diaristic work was created during the Covid-19 pandemic starting from the day her father was diagnosed with terminal cancer and finished the day he died.

Two new sculptural works made for her Kunsthalle Nuremberg survey exhibition drawn on all the above. First, the sculpture Ich habe den Senf in der Hand (I Have the Mustard in the Hand, 2023) which consists of a ‘wall’ made of an upholstery foam block with the dimensions of the artist’s own body with her hands stretched out. The material suggests it can soak everything in. The work also has two niches housing rubber gum boots covered in green peas like sequins. (Peas and poppy seeds reoccur in the artist’s work, as signs of infinite.) The soft sculptural wall was positioned as a threshold for the entire exhibition. And it was for this reason, we went walking together to anchor its sculptural metaphor in lived experience. The second work is a free hanging sculpture made using a strip of canvas which she laid out in the countryside and ‘printed’ with red bricks Zeitenkuss (Times Kiss, 2023). Both works arguably form a kind of spatial and conceptual coordinates of her survey exhibition. Clearly the wall, the path, the red bricks, relate to her personal experience, but the artist noted:

‘I want my work to have a moment in which it becomes available to other people on their own terms. There are some things, for example—like my grandfather’s prosthesis, which occupy my imagination, but I don’t feel like making art about. Even so, I realize more and more that so many of the materials and images I’m interested in now connect with intense childhood experiences.’

She is certainly not alone there. I wonder how many artists’ visual and material preferences are formed even before they become artists? But we both understand that art is not wholly psychologically specific to the artist the moment it becomes art in someone else’s mind. The viewer is, after all, a full-bodied subject with a nuanced past of their own. Art establishes a mysterious relation between subjects who don’t know each other necessarily that well. As if demonstrating this, and pointing to the interplay of passing time and process, the performance Der Schreiben for dem Liesen (Writing before Reading, 2023) took place on an indoor field of grass laid which the artist knew would die-off during the exhibition. But while it was still fresh, a group of actors dressed in white were engaged and given a white sack full of preserving jars. Completely absorbed with their actions, they were instructed to label the jars with a pen with the titles of the artist’s works, place the jars in the grass as they wished, and then leave. Their gesture was perhaps an offering to both the past and the future and an assertion of art’s role in mediating between them.

Alex Müller,Von Früh bis Spät, 2013 ink on canvas, 150 x 130 cm,

(II)

first the buds, then the rest

If you wish to put anything in the world—and that threshold question, as every artist knows, is fraught and ambiguous, something that can reflect in art’s multifarious forms—there is always the question of where to start. At the beginning you say—but beginnings often only make themselves abundantly clear later, in the busy overwhelming middle of things or at the frayed loose ends just as other not-yet-defined beginnings are starting to bud. Spatially speaking, there is also the dilemma of where to start: the top, the bottom, the ambivalent in-between. Here we will start at the back, in the second room of Berlin-based artist Alex Müller’s first solo exhibition at gallery Norbert Arns, Cologne ‘Erst die Knospe, dann der Rest’ (First the Buds then the Rest, 2024). There, drawn across the gallery’s lofty rear window and screening, not blocking the view, is the fabric work Das lässt sich sehen (That is something to behold, 2024). The work consists of a white curtain appropriated from the gallery, tagged all over with a reoccurring motif indicating weeks marked off in bunches of five as if scratched onto a prison wall. The work looks gentle, light, even as it raises a delicate subject; the specter of mortality. Too strangely elegant to be existentially bleak, this sculptural installation might be experienced as a statement of personal resilience, even a call to Carpe diem. Self-concerned as we all are, it perhaps matters only a little that the weeks numbered drolly summates the artist’s own life to date—all 4064 of them. I imagine a child born with a blank curtain. And then laugh at the theatrical, idiomatic pun that only works in English, not the artist’s native German, that eventually one day it’s curtains for each of us.

Even if that work, which could conceivably grace everybody’s window, comforts somewhat by suggesting that time and experience are lineal, quantifiable, measurable, containable, and able to be translated into a sign, elsewhere Müller’s work evidences and traces the fragmented limits of that notion. Working across mediums and methods, using high and low materials—from sensual color-drenched paint to peas, personal luggage encased in glass, and even dried up patches of lawn—her paintings, sculptures, works on paper and installations together form an eclectic, roving-eyed, off-beat, process-based whole. Everywhere on abundant display is an infectious eagerness for life, for not missing experience, for capturing, safekeeping and holding tight. Her work constellations in site-sensitive installations straddle competing impulses: to tell it all at once in every way imaginable, but also to leave things open and speculative, available to interpretation, ongoing, never complete—incessantly becoming rather than beginning and ending.

Installation view: Alex Müller, Der Pfau, der Nebel, das Brot, 2016, 135 x 125 cm, Tusche auf Leinwand, Courtesy Galerie Norbert Arns and the artist, Photo: Simon Vogel, Installations Ansicht Galerie Norbert Arns

Alex Müller, Der Pfau, der Nebel, das Brot, 2016, 135 x 125 cm, Tusche auf Leinwand, Courtesy Galerie Norbert Arns and the artist, Photo: Simon Vogel. (Portrait of the artist’s mother)

Viewing Müller’s paintings and objects, things are understood by re-engineering, remaking, revisiting. Throughout her work, objects, ideas, experiences, and images are recycled or upcycled, transformed, converted, inverted, recolored, re-articulated—the existing and coexisting producing new and manifold meanings. Take, for instance, Die feine Gemeinschaft (2024) consisting of collaged silverware again, marking passing time and presented like a kind of anti-monument to familial or societal expectations, perhaps? Precise meanings need not be fixed. Müller’s art making suggests that to grapple physically, to make, and even to struggle while doing so, is also to know, or at the very least, to come to terms with. Her own subjective framework, her personal biography, difficult constellations in life (her mother’s disability after a stroke, childhood and generational tensions played out across two Germanys), may be her reason to gravitate to this or that in everyday life. But when applied to art making, this communal everyday physical and psychic material allows viewers to step into the artist’s shoes while bringing along their own thoughts, preconceptions and desires. Compelling art objects are depositories, reservoirs of experiences, and narratives which require empathy and compassion to access. And if this happens, the conversation flows back and forth.

To prepare for this textual bud, I visited Alex in her studio on the edge of town. (To write is to think back, and reinvent in the present and make the past and present, however faintly accessible in the future.) Propped up on a window ledge was a slim volume of Paul Celan’s powerfully elegiac post-WWII poetry—wir lieben einander wie Mohn und Gedächtnis (we love each other like poppies and memory—from his poem ‘Corona’ published in 1952). ‘The book was a gift from the gallerist Nobert’, says the artist. Sitting there still casting its influence, the poetry is a reminder of how much is at stake in truly honoring life’s minutiae. Since 2011, Müller uses poppyseeds liberally, obsessively, to make paintings, wall drawings, cover the surface of sculptural objects, and to ‘draw’ on paper. The lines and fields the seeds produce are granular; it is poured out like grains of sand in the proverbial hourglass. But as these spreading seeds mark passing hours, all is not lost, for it is then that figures from the past and the imaginary may emerge and, through her art, produce flowers once more in our minds.

Installation view: Alex Müller, ‘Alexandraplatz’ 2025 at ZAK—Zentrum für Aktuelle Kunst, Berlin. Courtesy the artist and ZAK.

(III)

the begining is already determined

Everything we do rests on what has gone before. When we come to art, aesthetically speaking, we walk into a fully furnished room, bringing along our fully furnished selves. For her first solo show at gallery Haverkampf Leistenschneider, Berlin ‘Der Anfang steht schon fest’ (The Beginning is already Set) artist Alex Müller has reimagined the gallery’s upperclass bel etagé 19th century apartment with its classic proportions and lofty ceilings as if it were oddly re-domesticated. (An exhibition in a gallery is a cohabitation or form of vibe squatting, a claiming of someone’s space, if only a temporarily.) The artist’s constellation of diverse works summons up a subjective, fragmentary, familial space with many pasts and stories to tell. A suite of figurative paintings (some freestanding with ‘fat’ padded and stitched surfaces), curious sculptures (like Der Ursprung, 2024 that recalls a weird sex organ) and interventions (among them poppyseed wall drawings) echo, albeit strangely, experiences awakened from the artist’s family-minded memories and symbol-laden subconscious. Production and reproduction, seeds and reflections abound.

In this exhibition, Müller’s work also rubs up uncomfortably against the rule of thumb that an artist’s parents (unless they are art people themselves) rarely make their presence felt, whether in person in or as subjects, in their children’s galleries, or exhibition openings. There is something embarrassing, even taboo about it. Although there are, of course, many famous exceptions (Louise Bourgeois, for instance), the fact that this still generally holds true is telling. I think Müller was intuitively aware of this and conscious of going where it hurts by introducing us through art works to her parents to see what happens. Der wiedergutmache Engel (The Amends Angel, 2024) for instance, is a clothing sculpture consisting of a leather jacket the artist inherited from her much-loved father after his recent death from cancer during the Covid pandemic. To complete the work, the artist has covered the surface with stamps from the former GDR—the animal kingdom, depiction of socialist monuments, flag waving youths... The artist’s father was spotted for most of his life for abandoning his family in the East as a young man. In an essay for the artist’s catalogue ‘Bis der Zeit Vergeht’ (2023) accompanying her recent solo institutional exhibition at Kunsthalle Nürnburg, I explored Müller’s family’s history as it relates to her work. I was conscious that speaking about a working class family straddling two Germanys in the postwar WWII period—a more-commonplace-than-acknowledged tale as it is—was more than worth examining, though also strangely seldom addressed in contemporary German art of note. Some stories and narratives get told, others not.

For all of its gusto, raucous, joyful making and occasional pointed over sharing, Müller’s work is not afraid to examine where pain comes from. I am suspicious of art that pretends it has it all worked out, is perfectly pitched and brought to market. Contrast that in your mind with the poignant ink on canvas painting Das Ja (The Yes, 2016). The image depicts the artist’s mother reimagined in a washy deep blue sitting in her wheelchair where she was to remain for twelve years after a stroke. (I can count perhaps on one hand images of wheelchairs in contemporary painting. Art wants to see some things and not others.) The paintings both reach out and test the limits of empathy, even between a mother and child. And more generally, the gap between art and real-life experiences, not just the artist’s but yours too.

Thus, to open the exhibition, a hall of mirrors, the installation Ihr bei mir (2024), greets the visitor. For the artist, viewers too, are the beginning that has already been set. A series of rooms and doors dotted with diverse works then creates choices. To the right is a surrealistic ‘bathroom’ in which the dried pea-covered bathtub sculpture Der Anfang steht schon fest (2024) takes absurd center stage. During a studio visit, the artist explained:

“Das Badezimmer ist für mich immer der Ort gewesen. Jetzt nicht mehr, weil ich rauche. Jetzt ist es der Balkon. Aber als ich noch zu Hause gewohnt habe oder als ich bei meiner Großmutter war, in der DDR war die, war das Badezimmer immer der Ort, wo ich mich zurückgezogen habe. Immer. Und selbst wenn ich nicht auf die Toilette musste, habe ich mich auf das Klo gesetzt. Und wo habe ich draufgeschaut? Auf die Badewanne, auf die Badewanne und immer nur. Und dann gingen da draußen die Diskussionen los. Die DDR, die Mauer wieder Pakete machen und du hörtest es schon von weitem. Also es war ja jeden Tag Thema.”

Elsewhere too, Müller’s work evidences her magpie’s eye for the moving and absurd in the everyday world of things and images, materials and making. Unsurprisingly then, many of her work springs from collections of odd reminders and keepsakes (even the last slithers of bathroom soap) that might be useful later, suggesting a sensibility akin to a sound artist making field recordings from (one’s internal, emotional) life. Along the way, her work freely borrows from rich art making traditions, including surrealism, and the Fluxus and Feminist movements, although without being fussed about orthodoxy. In the air around her works are the ever present questions: who values what, who keeps and treasures what? And in art, true value is nothing less than the constant unfolding of meaning.

Installation view: Alex Müller, ‘Alexandraplatz’ 2025 at ZAK—Zentrum für Aktuelle Kunst, Berlin. Courtesy the artist and ZAK.