Lia Rumma Gallery is pleased to present the solo exhibition Schneller werden ohne Zeitverlust (Getting Faster without Time Loss) by Reinhard Mucha, which opens on 24 November 2016 at 6.30 p.m. in Milan.

The current show follows Mutterseelenallein, Mucha’s exhibition opened on 29 June 1989 in Naples: it was a major event destined to leave its mark on the longlasting relationship between the Gallery and the artist. Those were the years of Mucha’s remarkable solo exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Basel (Nordausgang) and Kunsthalle Bern (Kasse beim Fahrer) 1987, of Gladbeck, the show put on in 1986 at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, in Paris and the one shown two years previously at the Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart.

Mutterseelenallein – All Alone (The seats for attendants and visitors at the “Große Düsseldorfer Kunstausstellung” shot at the Kunstpalast Ehrenhof in Düsseldorf on December 30, 1979) is a distinctive museum piece in the form of sixteen wall-mounted display cases made of aluminum, float glass, enamel painted on reverse of glass, felt, 15 black-and-white photographs on baryta paper and wood, accentuating and transforming the gallery space in Naples into a site of melancholic elegance. At the centre of each case – except for one – was a black-and-white photograph of an empty chair. All different, the chairs were those that had been used by gallery attendants or tired visitors during the “Große Düsseldorfer Kunstausstellung” exhibition, held ten years previously in Düsseldorf. By examining the concept of the “art exhibition”, the work brought about a feeling of emptiness and loneliness, while also suggesting the poetry of waiting and symbolising the individual character of each of those inconspicuous chairs.

The history of this work is a series of events and moments captured and of poetic coincidences that occurred probably quite by chance. It is the story of an inescapable destiny that for many years has bound the artist to Italy.

Created for the spaces of Lia Rumma Gallery in Naples, the work remained for no less than nine years at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt (M.). Events now lost in time meant that the work would eventually embark on a new journey, to Italy, where it landed once again in 2009 and where it became part of the permanent collection of Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea.

Schneller werden ohne Zeitverlust is the latest episode in a long voyage that has been going on for nearly three decades, and the final step in a process that has all the appearance of a homecoming.

Reinhard Mucha is presenting this new exhibition project with at its centre “Die Verwandlung” (“The Metamorphosis”) a model sculpture of the historic Mutterseelenallein installation in Frankurt. A piece in which the history of the work is condensed and where the incorporated video monitors repropose the images of the installation at the museum in Frankfurt.

The entire exhibition spreads out from this nucleus, entering into a dialogue with a former industrial area of Milan in which the new gallery building has been constructed. It all fits in here, for the theoretical and conceptual premises at the heart of Mucha’s artistic research are once again able to bind effectively and directly with the architecture in which the exhibition takes shape as well as with the urban landscape surrounding.

In Insel der Seligen (Island of the Blessed), Mucha plays with this context and provocatively shows us a roof of ancient tiles as an image lying on the ground meticulously spread out on a bed of demolition rubble. The sense of drama and the key role of memory, its profound reflections and its criticism on urban reality are all chorally expressed in this profane room installation.

It is no coincidence that in The Wirtschaftswunder – To the People of Pittsburgh, included in the exhibition, you can see industrial objects produced inside the factory that was housed in the premises where the artist still has his studio today in one of the former areas of heavy industries in Düsseldorf.

The exhibition also includes the film Hidden Tracks never previously shown and some more new works that the artist has created over the years. This complete, comprehensive exhibition illustrates the complexity and depth of the work of one of Europe’s greatest contemporary artists. His work borrows direct and indirect references from Minimal Art and Postminimalism as well as from the world of Architecture and Design and refers to the critical discurse on museums praxis and its implicated issues. Combining them in an intimate, personal dimension, on a human scale, and with a powerful sense of transience, Reinhard Mucha creates works with a unique, unmistakable aesthetic and formal presence. These “containers” preside over the motionless portions of reality and everyday life within them. Through their preciseness, alienation and impersonality, these moments of the world convey all the sensations of an alien time, in a constant state construction and deconstruction.