Vera Ida Müller

Die Brüder

February 6 - March 20 2011

The paintings by Swiss artist Vera Ida Müller (*1979 in St. Gallen, lives and works in Zurich) are based on photographs that are projected in several layers onto the canvas. Through this process, parts of the photographic originals emancipate themselves from their three-dimensional context and turn into autonomous graphic elements. Over-projection and painterly transformation thus leave behind questions of photorealist references and perspectival correctness and allow more atmospheric qualities to return to the picture. Vera Ida Müller's artistic intent is not to deliver or reveal a specific relationship between reality and painting, but to examine how far identity can be reconstructed and constructed from painted visual data. It is all about the shady and blurred moments in a picture that offer freedom to painterly solutions. But her show at the Kunsthalle also provides a multi-layered sensual experience, for example in the audio installation Dialog, a recording of a tennis game can be heard, but consists only of the noises of the ball hitting the rackets; all spoken dialogue has been edited out. It is ever so telling for the artist's work that taking something away results in gaining something else: the lack of verbal communication here does not make the work less interesting but on the contrary adds a highly dramatic note to it.

Joëlle Menzi