The murals Paper Body (ghost), and Paper Body (pointer) by artist Ulrike Müller (both 2023) are temporary monumentalizations of two small-scale collages, which, enlarged in keeping with the scale of the architecture, were transferred to the wall as colored surfaces. In the process, the individual ‘scraps of paper’ of the collages became abstract, sometimes multi-tiered layers of paint, sometimes applied using a sponge technique. Ulrike Müller has integrated a group of six collages from the series Instrumentarium (2021) into the lower area of the mural on the right, Paper Body (pointer). Like the templates for the murals, they evolved during the Covid-19 pandemic, to interrogate, in a time of displaced realities, her own instruments—and thus the forms, colors, and methods of her artistic ‘paper body,’ setting them out on individual sheets of paper as tools. The Miniatures (2014) a group of 13 small enamel works at the front wall of the staircase, and the pattern for the bench’s cushion fabric, especially printed for the exhibition, extend this play with scale relationships and translations of material.
Since 2013, Ulrike Müller has been using painted walls for the architecturally staged and site-specific installations of her exhibitions. With The Conference of the Animals (A Mural), 2020, at the Queens Museum in New York, the mural itself shifted to the forefront. While drawings and prints were installed on the painted walls, these and the subsequent murals increasingly took on the status of independent works. In her process, Müller deploys varying strategies of estrangement: in the wall paintings for The Animal Within, 2022, a collection exhibition curated jointly with Manuela Ammer at mumok in Vienna, the distortion of cast shadows provided the motifs; in In Pieces (Traklhaus Salzburg, 2023), it was fragmentation and the scaling up and repetition of individual pieces culled from a small collage on the walls of the exhibition rooms. In the monumental space of the Ludwig Forum, Müller harks back to this strategy of enlargement, and downright blows up her work. By exhibiting the model of the Ludwig Forum in its center, she opens up questions about scale, context, and relations—not only within her work, but expanding into an interrogation of the institutional and spatial conditions of the museum itself. Beyond questions about the distribution of scale and value between a sheet of paper on the one hand and the largest wall in a museum on the other, the work also activates the relationship of drawing and painting, the status of painting in the collection of Peter and Irene Ludwig, the ties between the collection and architecture, between visitors and the institution. Ulrike Müller has developed a presentation for Ludwig Forum’s Light Tower that, rather than using the walls as mere display surfaces, deploys central elements of her work in the space—the only one in the museum extending over four floors—to obliquely query the instruments of collecting and exhibiting.
On the occasion of the solo exhibition Monument to My Paper Body by Ulrike Müller (December 9, 2023 – August 18, 2024), the Double Wall Projects series (2004–08), initiated by Harald Kunde, was revived. In this series, artists were invited annually to activate the two monumental walls of the museum as a space for artistic intervention. Since December 2023, the series has once again become a regular part of the exhibition program at the Ludwig Forum Aachen.
Photo: Mareike Tocha
