Stefan Müller (Frankfurt, 1971) paints in a very unusual way. His beginning was marked by the collaboration with Thomas Bayrle in Städelschule in Frankfurt, the starting point for many internationally reknown artists. Müller would soon have to go through an uneasy artistic path for the development of painting: halfway through the 90es, when the conceptual search for visualising ideas was winning over the creation of objects, the point was deciding whether painting was indeed plausible, or even possible, right at the end of the 20th century.

Today, at a very different point in time, the Heinrich Ehrhardt Art Gallery displays Müller’s first exhibition in Spain. Rather than being the result of a creative process, his works represent painting as a means and as a whole series of formal developments deriving from all its possible meanings. It is indeed to be considered as a step forward from all the a posteriori developments of Barnett Newmann’s Painting the Painting, Robert Ryman’s Painting the Paint, Lawrence Weiner’s Thinking the Painting and all reflections on the act of painting from Jasper Johns to, for example, some of the Spanish artists from the end of the 70es. In other words, Stefan Müller exposes a radical reinterpretation of matter. Some years ago, he started to develop a kind of painting without paint through which he turned tissues of different matter, size and colour into inertially rising art works, whose creative process could be easily defined as adding. While the action or act of adding was at the centre of his process, Müller applied an ample series of techniques to paint his own way, i.e. very uncommon tools and procedures so as to leave his individual mark on various canvases. As for our exhibition, thirteen are the works that reveal Müller’s vision of painting as described above.