Michael Müller: The Given Day. Castor & Polydeuces

The Städel Museum presents a solo exhibition by German-British artist Michael Anthony Müller. In three exhibition sections, the artist takes visitors into the mythological world of Ancient Greece with an expansive installation, drawings, paintings, and a sculpture.

The piece The Given Day (2021–2022), based on the ancient Greek myth of the Dioscuri, the twins Castor and Polydeuces, forms the heart of the exhibition. In battle, the inseparable brothers are divided by the death of Castor, a mortal. Zeus grants the two brothers a shared life—a life between the worlds. Henceforth the brothers alternate between a day spent in Hades, the realm of the dead, and a day on Olympus amongst the gods. A prologue consisting of Müller’s drawings and a sculpture interacts with works on paper from the Städel Museum’s collection to familiarize visitors with the myth. With his site-specific piece The Given Day, Müller also has different concepts of time enter into dialogue: Firstly, there is the physical notion of time, which allows for a subdivision of time segments into objective units; secondly, there is human-existential time, which evades such a strict subdivision. The work measures a total of 6 x 65 metres and is made up of 24 large-format canvases. They symbolize the 24 hours of the day, and Müller painted each exclusively at the hour of the day for which the respective canvas stands. The exhibition culminates in the garden halls, where Müller presents further groups of works and quite literally accompanies the visitors into the “underworld”.

By means of painting, but while also going beyond its boundaries, in the Städel Museum Müller thus presents a multi-faceted artistic reflection on the meaning of time, mortality, and love that endures outside time. In the process, he weighs up the potential of abstraction and asks the crucial question: Can an abstract artwork tell a story?

“The audience of the Städel Museum is invited to immerse themselves in Michael Müller’s pictorial world. His paintings present a contemplative, almost meditative way of working that includes thinking about the way the works evolve and highlighting that process. With the Michael Müller solo exhibition, the Städel Museum is presenting an artist who, in his most recent works, reflects on the significance and boundaries of painting in the 21st century,” comments Philipp Demandt, Director of the Städel Museum.

Michael Anthony Müller (born in 1970 in Ingelheim am Rhein) lives and works in Berlin. He studied Sculpture and Fine Art at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art under Magdalena Jetelová, before living for eight years in the High Himalayas in Alchi and Changspa (Ladakh). From 2015 to 2018 he was a guest professor at Berlin University of the Arts. His paintings, sculptures, video works, performances, and installations have been shown in international group and solo exhibitions. Between 2013 and 2017, the exhibition cycle Eighteen Exhibitions included 33 exhibition projects and four performances, presented at Galerie Thomas Schulte, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, and Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden.

Director: Dr Philipp Demandt 
Curator: Svenja Grosser (Deputy Head of the Collection of Contemporary Art) 
Press contact: Pamela Rohde (Head of Press and Online Communication): presse@staedelmuseum.de / T (+49 69) 605098 170
Press material: newsroom.staedelmuseum.de/en (texts and images for download)