Galerie Thomas Schulte presents from April 29 to June 24, 2017 two solo exhibitions Teil 18. Die Welt gibt es nicht! and Teil 33. Nachlass zu Lebzeiten by Michael Müller. The exhibitions constitute the finale of a four year cycle Eighteen Exhibitions, which started in April 2013 and which in the end will consist of overall 33 exhibitions and 4 performances.

In its recent iteration, the comprehensive solo exhibition Skits – 13 Exhibitions in 9 Rooms at the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden from November 2016 to February 2017, the cycle was summarised and continued. Now Teil 18. Die Welt gibt es nicht! and Teil 33. Nachlass zu Lebzeiten with due expenditure bring the cycle to an end – an exceptional and exuberant (perhaps programmatically preliminary) oeuvre. The cycle follows a certain order and chronology, in which various themes are approached almost scientifically and translated artistically. With these final exhibitions, the artist‘s attention is directed to the significant qualities of his own work. Between the works presented, clusters are formed, which can be regarded as pillars of the artist’s work. Teil 33. Nachlass zu Lebzeiten is probably Michael Müller‘s most personal exhibition. During the final act, the artist reconsiders the essential questions in which the drawings, the idea of the window and the principle of the map play an important role.

The opening will be marked by the performance Show: Garten der Freundschaft, when a newly designed fashion collection will be presented alongside a new product line of cosmetics. With the fashion collection Müller addresses among other things a hierarchy of materials. On the evening of the 28th of April this collection will successively be integrated into the exhibition Teil 18. Die Welt gibt es nicht!. A group of models will present the outfits, strip, and instead dress mannequins, which will be displayed in the Corner Space of the gallery (that at the beginning of the 20th century was a Jewish fashion store). As part of the exhibitions slightly altered versions of the names of brands – and their logos and trademarks – make an appearance including the name ‘om lotus’ in combination with the old, vaguely lotus-shaped Adidas label. Placed on top of an empty 3x3 meter glass cube it is positioned opposite a completed Sudoku. ‘Only the word,’ Giorgio Agamben writes, ‘puts us in contact with mute things.’

The exhibition title Teil 18. Die Welt gibt es nicht! is a variation of the title of a previous exhibition, namely Die Welt interessiert sich nicht für den Sinn, in which the central work was a series of small sculptures, which is being radically reinterpreted by Müller taking the form of soaps and perfumes. The second exhibition title Teil 33. Nachlass zu Lebzeiten is a reference to the title of a novel by Robert Musil whose Man Without Qualities stood at the beginning of Michael Müller’s cycle as a central point of reference. (Ulrich, the Man Without Qualities, decides to take one year leave from his life in order to find an occupation adequate for his skills.) The two current exhibitions bring together a multitude of heterogeneous works including Die Anderen, a series of formally diverse plaster sculptures resembling heads, and a series of drawings inspired by the act of reading Jacques Derrida’s Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question – and finally several works, which at the very end of the cycle reach back to the very beginning: to the artist’s earliest works.

Michael Müller, born 1970 in Ingelheim on the Rhine, lives and works in Berlin. He studied sculpture and fine art at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf with Magdalena Jetelová. In 2015 he was appointed professor at the University of the Arts Berlin. In the same year, Müller received considerable critical and curatorial acclaim for his Eighteen Exhibitions cycle, which resulted in a solo show Wer spricht? at KW Institute for Contemporay Art in Berlin, followed by a big institutional solo show at the prestigious Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden in 2016. Alongside numerous gallery exhibitions, Müller over the past ten years has participated in various institutional group exhibitions including Kunsthaus Dresden (2012) and the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in Bonn (2013).