Matthias Müller: Phantoms, Film and Photography

Timothy Taylor Gallery is pleased to present the first UK solo show by German film-maker and artist Matthias Müller. For this exhibition Müller has completed ‘Pictures’, 2002, and a new photographic series. These will be seen in conjunction with earlier films ‘Phantom’, 2001, and ‘Sleepy Haven’, 1993.
 
Müller’s films and photographs are enigmatic. Drawing on a variety of found film footage, narrative material is liberated from its story-telling function and transformed into a container of mystery and magic. Appropriation becomes an opportunity for both the excavation of sub-textual meaning as well as a poetic re-contextualisation of the moving image. 
 
Using the negative out-takes from feature films, ‘Phantom’, 2001, is a lyrically edited loop that repeats without end. Silhouetted figures wander restlessly in a domestic interior. In Müller’s words ‘They are a living dead confined to a cinematic space they cannot leave. They are the secret that lies between stories.’ The leitmotif of the curtain as a liminal state of being is revisited in Müller’s latest video ‘Pictures’, 2002. A figure at the window refutes the gaze and transcends categorisation as subject or object. Müller subverts the frozen still so that the work operates as a hybrid of film and photograph.
 
Müller’s use of syncopated light and shadow that move across the frame in is foreshadowed in ‘Sleepy Haven’, 1993. In this work Müller generates a visual equivalent of the literary style found in the sea novels of Melville and Conrad. Tinted in a deep oceanic blue, the images pulse in flashes and phosphorescent waves to induce a dreamlike state.
 
Matthias Müller is a filmmaker, video artist, photographer living and working in Bielefeld, Germany. He has taken part in major film festivals worldwide, including Cannes, Venice, Berlin and Rotterdam, and international exhibitions including documenta X and Manifesta 3. In 1994, MOMA, New York, dedicated a cinematic retrospective to him. His films and videos are part of the collections of institutions like the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and the Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona. Müller’s work has been honoured with more than 40 awards worldwide.
 
In the UK Müller has participated in several group shows including ‘playing amongst the ruins’, RCA galleries, 2001; ‘Notorious – Alfred Hitchcock and Contemporary Art’ at MOMA, Oxford, 1999; and ‘Claustrophobia’ at Ikon in 1998. Most recent was ‘Manual’, a collaborative exhibition with Christoph Girardet with FACT at the Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool, Spring 2002, to be toured to a London venue at a later date.