Harald F. Müller

Harald F. Müller’s art might be compared to the way a DJ works; his mix of materials includes photography, painting and sculpture. Extensive research in archives and libraries leads to the choice of a few significant pictures that he uses unchanged. However, by decontextualizing them, he undermines the self-evidence of their subject matter; they become ambiguous. The artist enlarges the pictures he has selected to as much as four metres, printing them on conventional Cibachrome paper mounted on thin panels of aluminium. The pictures are not hung flush with the wall but on sculptural mounts so that they appear to be floating. When viewed in close-up, the halftone dots of the enlargement turn the photograph into an artwork that allows for different levels of perception, from the objective to the abstract. The same effect is achieved when Müller crops pictures of architecture so that the three-dimensional image is transformed into a two-dimensional plane (of colour). —Dominique von Burg