Nevertheless, what artists as disparate as Lawrence Weiner and Donald Judd shared was a desire to consign the ideal of artist as craftsperson to the trash heap of history. In the 1960s, Anglo-American Conceptualists and Minimalists alike started outsourcing production wholesale in order to eschew any trace of the artist’s hand – albeit for vastly different reasons. But these formal similarities also belie deeper differences. In this sense, much of his work resonates with the early history of conceptual art and institutional critique: be it the museum wall cut-outs in Stockholmer Raum (Stockholm Room, 1998) or the overwhelming array of archival ephemera in Frankfurter Block (2012). His ambivalence towards middle-class mores found a clear formal analogue in a practice dedicated to deconstructing the display techniques of museums – those privileged sites of bourgeois self-reflection. Originally conceived for a show in the stairwell of Galerie Annelie Brusten, housed in a Jugendstil villa in Wuppertal, the installation at once reads as a parody of the virtues associated with upward mobility as well as an ironic commentary on his own position as an artist inhabiting this upper-class architecture – as if to say: that unruly boy made it after all. Each image is framed alongside a sheet of punitive lines – ‘I must keep quiet,’ ‘I must clean up after myself’ – that the young Mucha was made to transcribe ad nauseum in school. Such scepticism was formulated early on in works like Kopfdiktate (Head Dictation, 1980), which comprised a series of 30 photographs of the artist taken during the course of his life. Whether cause or effect, this affinity went hand in hand with an ambivalence towards the habitus of a middle class that sought to distance itself from the industrial labour upon which it rested. Meanwhile, the cheeky title of his later wall piece The Wirtschaftswunder, To the People of Pittsburgh III (1991) suggests he was also well attentive to the bleak prospects facing factory workers in the de-industrializing West. To the left: a stark technical diagram advertising a locomotive coaling system. To the right: a blurry snapshot of blonde baby Mucha playing with his toy trains. K.’ (1980), for example, was simply an advertising spread. His catalogue contribution for the group exhibition ‘Kunst ’80 – 2. And throughout his career, he maintained a keen sense of solidarity, if not identification, with industrial labour. Courtesy: © muchaArchive/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022 and Sprüth Magersĭespite his own middle-class upbringing, Mucha trained as a metalsmith before fully devoting himself to the field of art. Reinhard Mucha, Kopfdiktate (detail), 1980, installation view, Museum Kurhaus Kleve, 1997. The whole city effectively became a trick mirror in which industrial capital could contemplate a purified vision of itself. From the dust and smoke of blast furnaces, it birthed gleaming metals, immaculate displays, dazzling lights. As art historian Walter Grasskamp noted in his 2017 book on Hans Mayer, it was a city where the wealth extracted from the industrial Ruhr region was transfigured into the majestic steel and glass of big banks and department stores. This September, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen will jumpstart a contemporary reappraisal of Mucha by mounting the largest exhibition of his work to date, spanning both the K20 and K21 in the artist’s hometown. In his youth, he witnessed the city’s rapid reconstruction from a bombed-out ruin to a beacon of West German art, culture and glamour that would give rise to Kraftwerk and Claudia Schiffer. Born in 1950, Reinhard Mucha has spent most of his life in his native Düsseldorf, an epicentre of Germany’s postwar economic boom – the so-called Wirtschaftswunder or ‘Miracle on the Rhine’.
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