This artist’s works are reflections on the human existence. Where once large-scale paintings or elaborate sculptures gave lessons on characters and destinies, on vices and virtues, today the works by Regine Müller-Waldeck continue this narrative. It is the never-ending story of the fragility of a human being, of the eternal fight between confidence and despair, peacefulness and brutality, between basic trust and hope on the one hand and hardship and misery on the other.

As a socially and politically-alert personality, Regine Müller-Waldeck is not only concerned with the existentialist topic of ‘being-thrown-into-the-world’; she also questions the structures of relations and power we are bound into. That ranges from the individual relation with ourselves to gender-specific and interpersonal relations to the state executive and civil society. Her objects radiate a feeling of latent risk, they reflect the impossibility of controling interpersonal situations.

The extraordinary aspect of these works is this: while they deal with human experiences, man himself is absent. The objects are his representatives, they are symbols. Only in exceptional cases, for instance the wrung-out pieces of textile, is human activity recognizable.

On the whole as well as in detail, these objects are clearly identifiable, yet they remain enigmatic. There are – in Fence (2007) – familiar objects such as a door panel, a tilted chair frame and a branch, yet the head-like bundles immersed in wax remain mysterious, and our association with a raft must remain just an attempt at an interpretation. Similarly the wrung textiles: they are familiar to anyone who has ever tried to dry a piece of laundry; yet the interpretation of a „wrung existence“, as ever the same human fate, different as the human clay may be – that is the beholder’s point of view.

The objects and stagings are abstract and representational-narrative at the same time; the artist speaks of „frozen gestures and stills from a still running movie“. The clear readability might at anytime turn into a state of the absurd, scary or almost unrecognizable. This ambiguity is not the least based on the materiality of the objects. „My concern,“ the artist explains, „is to give the works their own lives, so that they exist just in their own materiality, their concrete medium and thus withdraw from the intellect and its verbal abstract structure.“

Biography

1975 born in Greifswald
lives and works in Berlin and Gristow, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern

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