Flirren ist menschlich

For its part, flickering as a verb sometimes belongs to the air, with its dancing mosquitoes or occasionally to the battling lights that assert themselves in the darkness. More recently, it also belongs to the shattered screen that lies in the hand like a shell. Human is that which is peculiar to man, or it is the attitude that gives the other person dignity. The title of the exhibition Flirren ist menschlich (Shimmering is human) originates from a work title that has not yet found its first syllable. But work and title usually find each other (at some point), like the beings and their names. The poetic quality of those words spins an exhibition title that has assumed patronage over the juxtaposition of works by the artist Stefan Müller and the artist Viola Relle. Considering its social character, art also has a tendency towards dualism. The continuity of art is a prerequisite for any form of artistic understanding, as it is tied to the consciousness of viewers who share common horizons of meaning and significance at a given point in time. This continuity forms the basis for the social character of art, in the sense of Ferdinand de Saussure, as artists constantly and collectively interact in the field of art. This continuous interaction in turn leads to a permanent change in art. Robert Walser walks in the snow, his words meandering like Stefan Müller's works; they shimmer through the freezing cold. Stefan Müller (born 1971 in Frankfurt am Main) is showing a selection of paintings from various creative phases of the past decade, right up to his most recent works. Each is self-contained and coherent in itself and none explicitly refers to its neighbour. The oldest work, Her Majesty Uglyness (2009), seems to grow out of the open exposed concrete and is enormously attractive. The paintings are stretched on fabrics and light linen; even in large formats they are wondrously tender. Müller concentrates on a simple and fragile connection between personal and aesthetic experience, without relying on the tricks and deceptions of post-conceptual painting. In his painting, he does not succumb to self-centredness, but establishes a connection between personal experience and aesthetic work that goes beyond the purely individual. Moving like seasons, Viola Relles' (born 1992 in Budapest) ceramics unfold and are organs or portraits, a narrative based on a true story (2024) accompanied by a famous poem or a body that is also a landscape. Each stands alone, unique and characteristic, only the artist's approach to the construction of the sculptures shows clear parallels. The sculptures are moulded and fired in individual parts and finally laid into one another in building blocks. Her technical skill allows associations to be made, for example with distant temple buildings whose monumental sculptural façades were carved in individual stones and later assembled. The architectural bodies take on different aggregate states, sometimes they are cuddly and soft, sometimes hard and loud. Their dynamic rebellion leads to different forms whose fields of tension lie between inside and outside, figuration and abstraction (similar to the phenomenological effect of Stefan Müller's works) or between sculptural space and painterly surface. It seems as if the sculptures, with their stubborn, organic statics, create mystical spaces of effect. In addition to the obvious unification of sculptural and painterly material, the exhibition Flirren ist menschlich also shows how artistic handwriting does not have to be emblematically solidified but can fluctuate in order to ultimately continue to carry its perpetual substance, like the field in which it moves.