From Yuri Stone, a curator based in Washington, DC
Luhring Augustine is pleased to announce an exhibition of iconic works by Reinhard Mucha, selected from throughout the artist’s career. Opening at our Chelsea gallery on November 14, the show marks the artist’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery, and his first major presentation since his retrospective “Der Mucha: An Initial Suspicion” at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, Germany (2022-2023).
Throughout Mucha’s artistic production of the past five decades run numerous themes that include collective identity, memory, nationhood, the psychology of architecture and institutional power, the museum as the locus for the creation of history, and the merging of industrial, historical, and political landscapes. Mucha’s complex work penetrates several dualities: connectivity and isolation, temporality and permanence, intimate narrative and national history, progress and stasis. For this exhibition, seven of Mucha's emblematic vitrine works along with the free-standing sculpture, Baden-Baden / Standard II, will be presented in a site-specific installation devised by the artist, which both acknowledges his own history with the gallery’s exhibition space and highlights the rigorous, cohesive nature of his practice.
In an insightful text commissioned by the gallery for the exhibition—composed in the form of a letter to the artist—Washington DC-based curator Yuri Stone, writes:
I’ve always thought of your objects as records of time in and of themselves. Your material palette is distinctly of a time before now. A time of solid wood doors, lacquer, lead paint, and fluorescent tube lights. I sense a preoccupation in your work with the things and systems we inherit: railways, bureaucracies, museum display cases, industrial production lines. You seem to suggest that modernity isn’t something we can escape or transcend—it is the very architecture in which we live and through which we remember. And yet, you transform that architecture—not by rejecting it, but by exposing it. And in this modernity we grapple with capitalism, war, joy, innovation, regression, and one another. We grapple with the uneasy realization that the very structures built to organize and contain our lives—our histories, our labor, our sense of order—also confine us. What you reveal is not a nostalgia for a lost authenticity, but a deep awareness that memory itself has become infrastructural: archived in vitrines, routed through railways, filed in drawers. The human and the mechanical, the personal and the institutional, the past and the present—these collapse into one another and often contradict each other. – Yuri Stone
Reinhard Mucha was born in Düsseldorf, Germany in 1950. He studied at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art under Klaus Rinke, developing his unique practice, later having seminal exhibitions of his work in the 1980s and 1990s. Such exhibitions include Gladbeck, his solo exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris in 1986; simultaneous presentations of Kasse beim Fahrer at Kunsthalle Bern and Nordausgang at Kunsthalle Basel in 1987; Das Deutschlandgerät at the 44th Venice Biennale in 1990, and on view since 2002 at Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf; Dokumente I – IV at documenta IX, Kassel in 1992; Mutterseelenallein at the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt a. M. in 1991-1999, and on view since 2009 at Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin; Wartesaal at documenta X, Kassel in 1997; and Stockholmer Raum, (Für Rafael Moneo), at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm and at Luhring Augustine, New York in 1998-1999. Mucha’s work is included in the permanent collections of numerous international public institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Musée national d’art modern, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Art Institute of Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Städelmuseum, Frankfurt a. M.; Castello di Rivoli, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin; Rubell Family Collection, Miami; Glenstone Collection, Potomac, MD; and Kunstmuseum Basel. Mucha resides in Düsseldorf, Germany and in Saint-Haon-le-Vieux, France.
