Thomas Müller’s practice highlights the importance of the handmade and the meaning of material choices in an odd way. His work relies on inbuilt contradictions of intact/broken, coherent/indistinct, permanent/ephemeral, and manifest/implied, which all relate closely to the still-life trope and its associations with life, decay, and death. In transit from one state to another, not quite destroyed, but transformed, his works—apparently caught in a gravity-defying moment of collapse—deal with the passage of time, destabilizing the notion of sculpture as something lasting.
If the word is an elemental unit of knowledge, Müller’s work, with its unique approach to text, illustrates how far that knowledge has migrated from hard-and-fast meaning to something fluid and open to interpretation. He employs single words or phrases that blend an almost childlike simplicity with highly sophisticated semantic play. This usage underscores the odd mutability of language, how in its written form it can only be in a perpetual state of flux. Müller’s work is an argument between reason and imagination in which neither side wins. The struggle itself, however, reveals a basic truth about the nature of language (and form), capturing a moment of inference in which language and its servant text hover between meaning and babble, leaving a space of expectancy in place of solid conclusions.
Kay Whitney: You recently began a gallery talk with a series of before-and-after images of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. Those images seem an apt metaphor for your work, which blends appearance and disappearance, destruction and renewal, certainty and uncertainty. Would you say that these concepts are at the heart of your work?
Thomas Müller: I remember hearing the story of the Buddhas on the radio. What was done to them was unequivocally awful, but at the same time, I thought, “These guys are making the Buddhist point that everything is ephemeral and nothing is real—even this kind of substantially constructed thing is an illusion.”
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