Ulrike Muller - Monument to my Paper Body

If Ulrike Muller's work only rarely takes the form of paint applied to canvas, she is nevertheless involved with painting. In her works on paper and enamel paintings, as well as her prints and woven rugs, Muller is known for taking up the legacies of early twentieth-century abstraction and its abounding lacunae, cul-de-sacs, undersides, and outliers. Less remarked upon are the wall paintings that serve, quite literally, as the frequent backdrop for this refiguration of abstraction. In thin layers but architectural in scale, the wall paintings conjure up the obverse of the modernist search for a universal language: the desire to transcend the boundaries of the individual work of art and to summon new collective audiences or otherwise dissolve into the social field. (Julian Nykolak)