Everything has its place in Mühsam's works and is consciously arranged. Nevertheless, the boundary between reality and illusion cannot be properly drawn. This boundary seems to be in constant motion and to vary. Always new folds and unfoldings. A reference to René Magritte or Giorgio de Chirico comes to mind. What is an image, what is being? What is real? What is perception? Giorgio Morandi once said: “Incidentally, I believe that there is nothing more surreal, nothing more abstract than reality.”
Armin Mühsam's works demonstrate the need to constantly strive for a language of showing that helps to bring the ambivalence of the artwork into the open. The necessity of a language that offers the possibility of allowing works of art to ask more than to answer, to give them attention, respect and care without enclosing them in a prefabricated space of interpretation. The birth of a question from the work itself.
Mirjam C. Wendt
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
| 1994 | BFA-Illustration. University of Applied Sciences, München, Germany |
| 1997 | MFA-Painting. Montana State University, Bozeman, MT |
| 2013 | Professor of Painting. Northwest Missouri State University, Maryville, MO |