Vera Ida Müller
Vera Ida Müller
"Memory and dream are fundamental to my painted and plastic creations. So far I've been drawing, like a parasite, on the traces left by the real world. And I've been using them to generate a network linking an inner and an outer world." Vera Ida Müller chose these words to summarize her work at the beginning of a long conversation I had with her in March 2006. At the time, the painting was accompanied by a three-dimensional model which she had built herself. It was an installation, but it also served as a source of inspiration and archive of ideas.
The archives are still there, even in her latest works. Her memories and dreams, snatches of which she often embodies in her works, serve as architectural drawings or close-ups in films, which then fade out. It is as though a heavy door to a secret, private archive swings briefly open and, seconds later, slams shut. She is well aware, of course, that all ideas are personal creations. Human beings are, as it were, the product of their ideas: ideas which they cannot avoid, but with which they can and do engage.
What painting portrays is the distillation of all these ideas, memories and dreams. The notion is reminiscent of a seminal passage from Marcel Proust's novel À la recherche du temps perdu, which reads, "No sooner had I recognized the taste of the Madeleine biscuits which my aunt used to administer to me, dipped in lime blossom tea, (...), than the grey house where her room fronted on to the street (...) came to mind, and with it the town, the square, (...) the streets, (...) the ways we used to take in fine weather." Vera Ida Müller's pictures likewise portray a house - not the one in Proust's novel, but one from her own memory. The house, a front garden and a street are overlaid with fragments of ideas from other situations.
As in a continuing film, individual sequences recur in her paintings - a window, a wall or an impression. But the next time they are sidelined or interwoven in the composition and almost unrecognizable. Other elements constantly re-emerge in the pictures, though their significance remains unclear. There are circling lines which seem to spin, and which trigger new ideas, bring memories together and prompt new pictorial discoveries. They are like further twists of the plot which lend new impetus to a story which had lost its way.
Vera Ida Müller invents no coded language. She paints what is going on in her innermost self and - related to this - what is happening around her. Her pictures mirror no intellectual experience. They deal, above all, with the physical. This is manifest in the pictures themselves, in their density. In the abundance of the information they convey, they are even comparable to 2D installations, ready to leap from their frames at any moment.
Simon Baur
"Memory and dream are fundamental to my painted and plastic creations. So far I've been drawing, like a parasite, on the traces left by the real world. And I've been using them to generate a network linking an inner and an outer world." Vera Ida Müller chose these words to summarize her work at the beginning of a long conversation I had with her in March 2006. At the time, the painting was accompanied by a three-dimensional model which she had built herself. It was an installation, but it also served as a source of inspiration and archive of ideas.
The archives are still there, even in her latest works. Her memories and dreams, snatches of which she often embodies in her works, serve as architectural drawings or close-ups in films, which then fade out. It is as though a heavy door to a secret, private archive swings briefly open and, seconds later, slams shut. She is well aware, of course, that all ideas are personal creations. Human beings are, as it were, the product of their ideas: ideas which they cannot avoid, but with which they can and do engage.
What painting portrays is the distillation of all these ideas, memories and dreams. The notion is reminiscent of a seminal passage from Marcel Proust's novel À la recherche du temps perdu, which reads, "No sooner had I recognized the taste of the Madeleine biscuits which my aunt used to administer to me, dipped in lime blossom tea, (...), than the grey house where her room fronted on to the street (...) came to mind, and with it the town, the square, (...) the streets, (...) the ways we used to take in fine weather." Vera Ida Müller's pictures likewise portray a house - not the one in Proust's novel, but one from her own memory. The house, a front garden and a street are overlaid with fragments of ideas from other situations.
As in a continuing film, individual sequences recur in her paintings - a window, a wall or an impression. But the next time they are sidelined or interwoven in the composition and almost unrecognizable. Other elements constantly re-emerge in the pictures, though their significance remains unclear. There are circling lines which seem to spin, and which trigger new ideas, bring memories together and prompt new pictorial discoveries. They are like further twists of the plot which lend new impetus to a story which had lost its way.
Vera Ida Müller invents no coded language. She paints what is going on in her innermost self and - related to this - what is happening around her. Her pictures mirror no intellectual experience. They deal, above all, with the physical. This is manifest in the pictures themselves, in their density. In the abundance of the information they convey, they are even comparable to 2D installations, ready to leap from their frames at any moment.
Simon Baur