Reinhard Mucha: Hidden Tracks
Luhring Augustine, 531 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011
2 November 2013 - 11 January 2014
From the Press Release
Hidden Tracks is an exhibition of recent work by the German artist Reinhard Mucha. Throughout Mucha’s artistic production (of the past four decades) run the themes of collective identity, memory, nationalism, the psychology of architecture and power, the museum as the locus for the creation of history, and the merging of industrial, historical and political landscapes. His complex work penetrates several dualities: connectivity and isolation, temporality and permanence, intimate narrative and national history, progress and stasis.
Hidden Tracks features a selection of vitrine works by Mucha from the past five years; most of the works in the exhibition have never before been shown publicly. Mucha’s longtime use of the vitrine as a formal device in his sculptures - in both wall works and floor works, hanging and standing - is a method through which he explores the evocation, depiction, conservation, and illustration of memories and history. The wall vitrine especially becomes a type of stage on which is presented the unspoken with the literal, the visible with the invisible, the publicly-minded with the personal. Even more pointedly, the hanging of the wall vitrine on the wall of the gallery or museum transforms the sculpture into a virtual window into the workings of the exhibiting institution.
Reinhard Mucha was born in Düsseldorf, Germany in 1950 and studied with Klaus Rinke at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art, where he began to develop his highly complex artistic language that would find full form in a number of seminal installations in Europe throughout the 1980s and 1990s. These include Gladbeck at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris in 1986; Mutterseelenallein at the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt a.M. in 1991-1999, and since 2009 at Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Torino; Das Deutschlandgerät at the 44th Venice Biennale in 1990; Wartesaal at documenta X, Kassel in 1997; and Stockholmer Raum, Für Rafael Moneo at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm in 1998. His work is in the permanent collections of numerous international public institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Art Institute of Chicago; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.. Mucha resides and works in Düsseldorf.
