I’m plenty adept at phrasing things with more detail and nuance than this, but to put it plainly, the artwork of German artist Reinhard Mucha is extremely cool.
I was first introduced to Mucha’s decades-long practice at an exhibition in 2023 by Francis Irv, an art gallery in New York City — and I was struck, immediately.
I am immensely and endlessly drawn in by repurposing in art — which I also wrote about in another recent review, and Mucha utilizes building, industrial, similarly external structure-invoking materials in intricate — and repeatedly large — assemblages. And from the single piece in that 2023 exhibition, I could quickly ascertain that Mucha was using these byproducts of industrialization and the sheer, forward march of time to speak — crafting, in some way, a language that felt intrinsic to the materials with which he works.
A rise-and-fall of signposts towards our indefinite, collective quest towards further development, industrially and socially.
Reinhard Mucha at Luhring Augustine
Though that phrasing might rather obviously suggest my own vantage point — as an American, who grew up in the country and continues living in its particular perch within this globalized, capitalist epoch, Mucha also focuses specifically on what I’ve seen explained as West German cultural development, which seems invoked by the titling in Mucha’s new exhibition at Luhring Augustine in New York.
The gallery’s spotlight showcases Before the Wall came down / Lennep [2013] 2008 / 2009. The concluding two years in that informational string are the creation points for the two sculptures comprising what here is a “two-part work ensemble,” as the checklist lays it out.
And starting at just the materials list for the wall-mounted portion (there’s also a freestanding part) points towards the captivating ambition of Mucha’s work. It includes: Aluminum profiles, float glass, alkyd enamel painted on reverse of glass, oil paint print on bituminized feltbase (flooring, found material), panel door with hinges synthetic resin paint, solid wood (split found object), felt, blockboard. (The stylization of that list is also the artist’s doing.)
In the wall-mounted part of the exhibited ensemble, that panel door was split top to bottom, with open space where the panels would be. And the two pieces were placed parallel to one another, overlapping slightly while jointly towards the front of the boxy construction. Behind the door were smaller, cabinet-like spaces lined apparently with that felt — invoking, for me, a reliquary or similarly intended religious object, historical or modern. The smaller spaces created a feeling of intimacy — left essentially open and less constrained by the float glass that laid atop the whole thing, allowing the visitor to peer inside.
Before the Wall came down, 2008, which is the free-standing part, was a nearly entirely transparent (thanks to more float glass) display, containing within it 126 folding rulers, alongside other materials. It was reserved but strikingly elegant — disparate materials in a presentation clearly distinct from how you’d most regularly find these things, but asserting itself with purpose.
Here and elsewhere in Mucha’s work, the visual rhythms of moving from point to point felt surprisingly personal.
Lennep, 2009 — the component work on the wall — was a self-sustaining ecosystem, a loop in which you could indefinitely move visually forward, back again, then forward once more, thanks to the even-keeled arrangement of the four main visual areas led by the two door parts and their accompaniments: aesthetically structured like an “X” or maybe an infinity symbol/overturned “8.”
Above image: Reinhard Mucha, Before the Wall came down / Lennep, [2013] 2008 / 2009. © muchaArchive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.
Living in Our Many Spaces
That sense of movement mirrors our own physical movements through inhabited, physical spaces around us: progressions through life in which the physical nature of our environments becomes subsumed into our subjective, shifting, forever evolving perspective. Mucha presented a psychological landscape created with pointed materials that could directly push forward the development of such a thing.
And as smooth as Mucha’s overall, aesthetic presentation was in this exhibition, there were also points of possible slip-up: that looming possibility, hanging like a cloud.
As he held the empty, cabinet-evoking space within his work in stasis, it left a perhaps ominous, dubious sense of uncertain possibility, combined with the arguable conceptual instability of the work created via making your own looking be such a central, spotlighted part of your experience of it. Through Mucha’s utilization of glass, you’re left acutely aware of your own role as the viewer — mirroring, I’d say, the tendency towards voyeurism across much of our contemporary social environment.
An experience of assembled self punctured by an outsider, leaving you hanging between a sense of disrepair and recreation.
In a social, personal, or strictly artistic context, is that dangled possibility of recreation — reassembling — an illusion, something that doesn’t actually deliver the kind of renewed, refreshed strength it promises? Mucha’s artwork puts forward the possibility, while also crafting enthralling, enthusiastic movements of exploration that feed back into a strikingly unified image — reflecting real-world processes of self-image.
Emotionally, the artwork comes across like a character-of-sorts you could see while walking the streets. The free-standing portion of the Luhring Augustine exhibition, which is about six feet tall, could even be imagined as directly invoking an actual human figure. You get the sense, though, that these characters — these transfigurations of physical space into captured memories and reflections of lived experience — are weighed down. The repeatedly boxy nature leaves that impression: a lot of sharp edges, forceful corners, hulking figures.
But it’s not all a compression, by far; that’s just part of it, combined with the forward flow through space that Mucha’s work puts forward. It’s an infusion of personality — a reflection, likely, of what was already there — in markers of our lived environs. As contemporary economic development moves ever forward, creating new buildings and expanding cities, it’s a resounding banner of an assertion: We’re still here, in the middle of all this!
Mucha’s exhibition continues through October 19.
Above image: Reinhard Mucha, Before the Wall came down / Lennep, [2013] 2008 / 2009. © muchaArchive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.
Featured image: same image and same credits as listed above
You may also like
-
“Ellsworth Kelly: Black and White” at Matthew Marks Gallery: Art Exhibition Review
-
Alexandre da Cunha: “These Days” at James Cohan, New York: Art Exhibition Review
-
“Gerome Kamrowski: An American Surrealist” at Lincoln Glenn: Art Exhibition Review
-
Wilfrid Almendra: “Lilac Dust and Poppy” at Ceysson & Bénétière, New York: Art Exhibition Review
-
James Little: “Affirmed/Actions” at Petzel, New York: Art Exhibition Review