Otto Muehl: Paintings and Drawings from the 80’s
Curated by Bjarne Melgaard
25 September – 24 October 2015
Opening: Thursday, 24 September, 18:00 – 20:00. More at: Rod Bianco
Otto Muehl: Untitled (2 Affenmenschen mit Gewehr)
1982
Oil on Canvas
120 x 100 cm
Austrian artist Otto Muehl was a co-founder of and participant in Viennese Actionism and the founder of the
Friedrichshof Commune outside Vienna. From 1968 on, Muehl developed a form of masterly amateurish
painting. He thus numbers, along with Picabia, among those whose work prefigures contemporary “bad
painting.” The heterodox, vulgar, and banal character of these works doubtless records a “moment of
rebellion” and a “different habitus,” pointing, on the one hand, to Muehl’s actionistic call for a demolition of
panel painting itself, and, on the other, to an attempt at a re-evaluation of art’s terms in the actionistanalytical
commune he founded. The works shown at Rod Bianco were created between 1980 and 1985.
About ten years prior to that, Muehl withdrew from the art scene altogether – after the scandal of his
appearance at Harald Szeemann’s exhibition “Happening & Fluxus” at the Kunstverein Cologne and the
simultaneous International Cologne Kunstmarkt, which branded him once and for all the “bad boy” of the art
world – and retreated to his own commune. In a series painted in 1983, he refers to these events with
sarcasm and irony.
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