MICHAEL MÜLLER
Fragmente der Zeit

B: Michael Müller, EIN WERK, DREI BILDER /
Part 1: Ein Werk, drei Bilder (Kastor und Polydeukes am Rande des Spiegeluniversums) /
Part 2: Twin world (Ein Werk, drei Bilder (Der Olymp als Spiegel oder gibt es ein Ende der Welt?)), 2022-2024
Q: Michael Müller, ; (DIE SCHWELLE), 2020
C: Michael Müller, DO IT! (SETTING UP HISTORY) #1, 2016

B
Fragment of the Twins #3

Overlapping layers of visibility and invisibility are paralleled in the complex network of relationships between the works: motifs from one painting reappear in another, some digitally altered and reprinted onto canvas, as in the diptych "Ein Werk, drei Bilder" (One work, three pictures) (2022–24). These repurposed fragments then serve as foundations for further painterly elaborations, where gestures conceal some elements while revealing others. "In painting, I search for what cannot be seen," is how Anton Müller describes the task. "An artist discovers what is initially invisible. Painting is about making that visible."

The twins repeat themselves. Their days repeat over and over again. "Ein Werk, drei Bilder" repeats elements from the monumental "Der geschenkte Tag" (The Given Day), which itself repeats the daily cycle of the Dioscuri. The artist calls the two paintings his "twin works". They repeat the repetition. The technical repetition of reproduction: the motifs of one canvas panel of one work were photographed, colored on the computer, erased, distorted, manipulated, mirrored, grained, refined, enlarged, reduced in size, shifted, then printed on the light brown canvas of the other panel. The repetition of painting and content: Painterly gestures and motifs from one large painting appear in the other in different colors and forms. The artist’s body, his hands repeat with colors and utensils on the canvas. Repetition of the viewer: The gazes jump back and forth. Which is the original painting, which the subsequent one? They are both at the same time. The gazes bring the invisible back into view. Conclusions can be drawn from one picture about what has been painted over and concealed in the other.

However, each repetition also varies. In one part of the work, in the brighter "Twin world (Ein Werk, drei Bilder (Der Olymp als Spiegel oder gibt es ein Ende der Welt?))" (Twin world [One work, three pictures (Olympus as a mirror or is there an end of the world?)]), the artist leaves open whether the large canvas should be hung on the left and the smaller one on the right—or vice versa. The panels can be relocated, hence perhaps "three pictures". What was originally on the outside can suddenly be in the center, what was in focus can slide to the edge.

Q
Fragment of an Image #3

A threshold blocks the way to the two paintings that the artist calls the Olympic ones, but whose titles scream the opposite. Erinyes who have not yet been reconciled and cannot be pacified: "Formbewahren (unrühige Furien der Avantgarde)" (Preserving form [restless furies of the avant-garde]) and "Arbeit macht frei (nach Stella)" (Arbeit macht frei [after Stella]) (both 2025).

The daily path down from Olympus is without thresholds, the path up is an obstacle to be overcome. Castor and Polydeuces must cross this threshold anew every day. Every second morning, coming from heavenly Olympus, they have to drink of forgetting from the river Lethe on their way to Hades, and forget everything, forget much more than people who after dying merely have to lose the memory of their life on earth: every other day Castor and Polydeuces forget perfection, redemption, the absolute knowledge of divine heaven. The moment before drinking the water must be unbearable; they know what they will forget. They have to forget the forgetting; forget what they have already forgot the day before yesterday. Absolute emptiness. However much they resist, crying out to the paradise from which they were expelled. And the day tomorrow, the way back up to Mount Olympus, is the total contradiction: suddenly knowing everything again, remembering everything. Remembering that you have forgotten, that you will forget again. A life on the threshold between memory and oblivion, seeing and blindness, visible and invisible.

The painter Anton tells of another threshold, or is it the same one? "The threshold in the painting process, at the border between painter and painting—a boundary that seems insurmountable until you have overcome it all at once, with a leap, a jump, an urge. Something swells in front of the picture, something that wants to break out, in the moment just before you get up from your chair to go back to the canvas—a dripping brush in your hand—to continue painting, to transform, to bring something from one realm into another, to put it into the world, to deliver it. The threshold between the intelligible and the visual, contemplation and action."

C
Fragment of a Biography #4

A hand reaching from behind, a penetrating look.
It will be one of those nights that the friends will later often recollect,
made up of fragments and colored anew again and again.
They praise the joys they shared, the colorful memories projected onto the inner walls of their brains,
and feel the intimacy of the time they shared.

D: Michael Müller, ROTES EIDLAND / HERAKLES FÄRBT MIT BLUT DES GERYON / ZWEITER BESUCH: DER RAUM ALS MOTIV UND NICHT ALS ORT / DRITTER BESUCH: UNZEITGEMÄSSE SEEUNGEHEUER (FRAGMENT 2), 2021-2022

D
Fragment of the Twins #1

Sons of Leda, conceived in one night by different fathers—one by the father of the gods, Zeus, in the guise of a swan, the other by the mortal king of Sparta Tyndareus—brothers of the beautiful Helen, Argonauts, raiders of the Golden Fleece, with Heracles conquerors of the Amazons, heroes, legendary pugilists and horse tamers, victors, fallen, kidnappers, lovers, wanderers between the worlds, constellations in the night sky: The unequal twins Castor and Polydeuces—one mortal, the other immortal—choose, out of love for one another, to share a single fate. After the mortal Castor fell in a bloody battle, the immortal Polydeuces begs his father Zeus to strip him of his immortality so that he can join his brother in Hades, the shadowy realm of the dead. Zeus, moved by the twins’ love that transcends death, offers Polydeuces the choice of remaining eternally young or spending alternate days with his brother in Hades and on Mount Olympus among the gods, but ageing and ultimately dying in the process. Polydeuces chooses mortality. From then on, both alternate daily between life and death, wandering between the worlds—not entirely home in either—and lingering on the uncertain threshold of daily new beginnings and daily endings—being born and dying every day. A lament reads: "But if you are yearning, then sing the lovers: for long / their notorious feelings have not been immortal enough. / … Begin, always as new, the unattainable praising: / think: the hero prolongs himself, even his falling / was only a pretext for being, his latest rebirth."

E: Michael Müller, FORMBEWAHREN (UNRÜHIGE FURIEN DER AVANTGARDE), 2025
F: Michael Müller, ARBEIT MACHT FREI (NACH STELLA), 2025
G: Michael Müller, PLATONS HÖLLE (FRAGMENT 1), 2021-2022

E & F
Fragment of a Biography #3

Anton’s words report in gloom: "Castor experiences the world as troublesome, as if there were an overpowering decree or edict to experience the world as such. Since the gods left the world of men, since they are without history. He remembers all too well the happy days of his childhood, the contented smiles that shone among the people. The simplicity of life and death. And now it’s all a complicated mess, Anton thinks as his eyes caress the sleeping body next to him. Even the great ideas of the philosophers, he thinks at this moment, have withered and failed against the insurmountable wall of the undivided sovereignty of the solidary. This wall is a projection surface, a promised future horizon, and like history, which takes shape without even thinking of a designer, impossible to climb. The exhaustion of thought, which Anton attests to his time and especially to himself, makes him a lonely man. A lonely man in the mass of lonely men. Polydeuces is not interested in time, nor does he know any time. To be without time means being without history, or history as a distant narrative before time. For him, time is day and night—no more. The testimony hurts. It is the one that tells of the dissolution of the We. This lost We is an empty set. A quantity that is mathematically necessary, but as a basic constant of life has brought the deepest pain into the world of human children. It is the children who no longer play, who no longer share the ball. No more back and forth. Everything is motionless. It is the children behind the screen who fall silent. Silenced sights. Whatever letters are formed, whether it is called family, communion, community or communism, the image of the We is lost. We have all become free atoms, as Polydeuces says, without forming a molecule, something in common. We are completely privatized in our time—we have become private. A privacy without any intimacy, neither with ourselves nor with the other. Polydeuces’ words fall into Anton’s head: ‘It is lost to us. An intimacy without confinement. Closeness and deep intimacy in friendship and care of the gods as hope for each other.’"

G
Fragment of the Twins #4

It’s so much easier, Polydeuces, to choose to die every day when you’ve never died before. Haven’t suffered the torments of death. Easier to ask the father—the father of the gods—to let you go to Hades, to your love, to the darkness, the shadows’ realm.

Nobody asked Castor if he wanted to die. He has already died. His gain now is dying every day. For him, heaven is hell. It glows red, yellow and orange, is black.

And now, every day, the unrepeatable uniqueness of birth—just the everyday new beginning.

M: Michael Müller, DAS GEMÄLDE ALS OBJEKT, 2025

O: Michael Müller, LPHY (AM KREUZ), 2022-2023

P: Michael Müller, PAINTER‘S STICK (THREE DAYS), 2023

Fragment of an Image #2

Rubbing sand into your eyes, Greek sand from ancient times, when everything was still animated and alive, dust-dry and sea-wet. Rub gently back and forth. From left to right. Blink briefly. A fleeting moment. Delicate sandpaper. Light finger pressure. Are the pupils still deep black, is the iris still green? Castor’s eyes, Polydeuces’ eyes—Anton’s eyes. Fine sand. Sleep. Until you can no longer see anything clearly. Blurred, veiled. Wipe again. Black. Open your eyes. Nothing. Nothing at all. New story, first story. This story. Very old, new again. Yesterday is today.

In varying degrees of transparency, as in the diaphanous surfaces of "Das Gemälde als Objekt" (The painting as an object) (2025) and "LPHY (am Kreuz)" (LPHY [on the cross]) (2022/23), through to the more opaque, melancholic canvases of the black on black "Der erschöpfte Sigmar Polke" (The exhausted Sigmar Polke) (2025). Between fiery red-orange visions of Hades and cloud-white depictions of Olympus ("Aides-Olymp Schwebebahn GmbH" [Aides-Olympus Cable Railway Ltd.], 2022), the artist translates the mythical world of the narrative into our visible reality: the Dioscuri’s daily traversal of these worlds tears images into unequal parts ("Sturz in einen anderen Raum, zur gleichen Zeit" [Fall into another space, at the same time], 2021/22).

H: Michael Müller, PLATONS HÖLLE (FRAGMENT 2), 2021-2022
I: Michael Müller, STURZ IN EINEN ANDEREN RAUM, ZUR GLEICHEN ZEIT (FRAGMENT 1), 2021-2022
J: Michael Müller, DER HADES IST IN DER WELT, 2021-2022

H
Fragment of a Biography #2
Spot in and on spot.

Passage in the simultaneity of the image.
The individual spots stand next to each other,
only the painter knows the sequence in which they appeared,
now they are all there at the exact same time,
superimpositions reveal a little, reveal rhythm and time.
This eternally bound twin pair of space and time.
We pass them like the spots in the picture.

I
Fragment of a Biography #5

The Cosmos sleeps and closes his eyes,
but the soul never sleeps, the retreat of the body and mind open the landscape to it.
The patient Atlas rests, the shoulders give way, the spine relaxes, the vault of the sky tumbles.

Everything is in motion there, above and below swap their places,
mountains sink, lakes rise to peaks, right turns to left, green becomes red,
the ugly turns to beauty, the pretty transforms into grotesque, a constant exchange,
everything, yes, everything is subject to a different order,
the order of the night.

"Sleep day," she whispers, the gaseous Chaos has awoken, he was the first, and claims his right—it is night—it is his night.

Mind grows broad and flat, stretches, almost transparent sleep,
but the soul wanders, wanders in sleep, the day of the firstborn,
the gray water of oblivion rises, will swallow the night.
And you? ... wandering in daytime sleep.

J
Fragment of Time #1

The central theme of Müller’s painting is the exploration of time. At first glance, nothing seems more familiar to us than time—and yet it remains enigmatic, as the philosopher Augustine already stated 1600 years ago: "What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I do not know." While in the physical model of the sciences, time is uniform and can be divided into units, in human perception, time flows uninterruptedly at different speeds, expanding and contracting. While an hour can be divided into 60 equal minutes on a clock, the attempt to isolate fragments from lived time is a violent act that illuminates some things and obscures others. Nevertheless, we constantly and often unconsciously detach fragments of time from the continuous stream of life: memories and stories that have a beginning and an end, happenstances that form a fate. The contradictory nature of life. The fragments of time on display in the exhibition tell of a time before time, of the history-less and eternal time of the gods; and at the same time, they tell of a myth of mortal-immortal twin brothers between life and death in everyday time.

Michael (Anthony/Anton) Müller’s room-filling monumental painting "Der geschenkte Tag" (The Given Day), which was first shown in 2022/23 as part of a solo exhibition at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt and is currently on view in a space-specific and expanded version at the Neues Museum on Berlin’s Museum Island, follows a recurring daily cycle in the lives of the twins Castor and Polydeuces, the so-called Dioscuri from Greek mythology. For FRAGMENTE DER ZEIT (Fragments of Time), Müller revisits this myth from a new perspective. Using abstract painting, the works shown here capture "fragments" of this narrative, with allusion to specific events and situations from the lives of the Dioscuri, while still drawing on personal connections and questioning his own role vis-à-vis this intricate constellation. An amalgamation of ancient, written and orally passed on history and the lived present of an artist—an emulsion of immiscible times.

K: Michael Müller, DIE SEHNSUCHT DES UNBESTECHLICHEN FÄHRMANNS, 2025
L: Michael Müller, AIDES-OLYMP SCHWEBEBAHN GMBH / Teil 1. Bergfahrt (Olympischer Milchregen)¹ / Teil 2. Talfahrt (Bilder, nichts als Bilder, kein Leben)² / ¹ Alternativer Titel: „vor Augen gestellt - das Winkelmann‘sche Drehmoment oder das Begreifen hormoneller Schwankungen” / ² Andere Farb- und Mengenverhältnisse, 2022
A: Michael Müller, DER ERSCHÖPFTE SIGMAR POLKE (NACH EINER BEGEGNUNG MIT MERZ UND BEUYS), 2025

K
Fragment of the Twins #2

"The analysis of perception, as described by Merleau-Ponty, not only illustrates in general, in contrast to the geometric construction of space, the corporeal involvement—the being-in-space—of the perceiver in the reality that shows itself—both the perceiver and the reality that shows itself are mutually part of the whole—but also the special significance that the movement of seeing has in painting," writes Müller. The souls dwelling in the underworld, the shadows of the deceased, haunt the darker works, the supreme power of the gods dwelling and ruling on Mount Olympus calls into question the artist’s authority over his own works. What in a work of art is committed to eternity, and what is subject to vagaries of time and decay? And what happens when one belongs to neither world, or to both at once—like the boundary-crossing Castor and Polydeuces? How does the meaning of ancient myths shift when they are reinterpreted in the present and transformed from the universal to the personal? What does the painter see in his own works, and what do the viewers perceive in turn? "The gaze is not an objective, mechanical measurement. The eye moves, curiosity constantly shifts its focus," says Müller. "Sometimes the lens is clouded, sometimes clear. A thought places a filter upon it. A feeling, like a speck of dust, irritates the gaze." Is the glowing orange behind the darkest clouds in "Die Sehnsucht des unbestechlichen Fährmanns" (The longing of the incorruptible ferryman) (2025) a foreboding of the torments of hell, or the hopeful shimmer of the glory of the Olympian gods?

L
Fragment of an Image #1

For a viewer, the picture in front of him is a given. It is what it is. Never has it been different. For the painter—his name here is Anton—the picture lives in time, has past, present and future, memory and oblivion. He is still aware of the emptiness of the picture, still sees what is now invisible, the overpainted areas now covered by layers of paint. He knows to tell of the time when there was no picture, of the absence of a picture, when the canvas stood before him unprimed. Sadness and weight about everything that is irretrievably past for others. For him, however, it is always present. Anton’s paintings here in this church tell the story of the twins Castor and Polydeuces. Unequal brothers - one, Castor, mortal, the other, Polydeuces, immortal. In prehistoric times, in mythical Greece, born and died daily, ascended—daily—to the heaven of Olympus, descended—daily—to the hell of Hades. Painter Anton is their witness, observer, companion

A
Fragment of a Biography #1
Invocation of the muses

Loudspeaker: "Flight PC204 ready for boarding at gate B15"
Pegasus Airlines takes me from Frankfurt via Istanbul to Athens,
Flight PC1193 delayed as usual,
a red and yellow adventure, as only a low-cost carrier guarantees.

I took train 58 from Athens to Thebes,
arriving late at the foothills of Teumessos.
Time moves slower when you‘re on the move,
instead of the bus, Achilléas takes me to Elikonas, leaving the city through one of the seven gates.

One night in the house of Acheron, his brother,
an old stone house standing on Boeotian soil for some time
and packed with religious plastic kitsch of a son of God,
is my shelter for the night.

Early, violet-dark hour, I head off.
With me—olives packed in little transparent plastic bags,
yogurt and tomatoes—a sack packed the night before.

My destination: Helikon.
At the foot of the mountain, I see sheep scattered across the landscape
or goats.
No, rather both!

My feet cool off in the stream,
the little yellow Reclam book.