Fragmenta in lumine
New Story, first Story.
This story.
Very old, yet new again. Yesterday is today.
The exhibition Fragmenta in lumine by the German-British artist Michael Anthony Müller, on view from May 5 to September 6 in the Monks’ Dormitory, places the three windows he created for the Basilica at Eberbach Monastery within a broader context of his artistic oeuvre. It offers insights into the background and thought processes that guided the artist in his work on the windows.
In terms of their motifs, the windows—which are complex in both technique and content—are based on the painting Magnesia ad Sipylum (Fragment 1) (2021/2022) shown here and reinterpret the narrative of an ancient Greek myth about love, time, death, and eternity. The myth of the Dioscuri tells the story of the twin brothers Castor and Poly-deuces. The sons of Leda, a figure often depicted in art history, are conceived in a single night by two different fathers: one by Zeus, the father of the gods, who takes the form of a swan to seduce Leda; the other by her husband Tyndareus, the king of Sparta. While one is immortal as the son of a god, the other remains mortal as the son of two humans. After Castor’s death, Zeus grants the inseparable brothers the opportunity to be reunited, spending one day among the gods on Mount Olympus and the next in Hades, the realm of the dead—an eternal cycle of birth and death.
Michael Anthony Müller’s monumental painting The Given Day (2021–2022/2025), originally created for a solo exhibition at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt and currently on view at the Neues Museum in Berlin, uses the language of abstract painting to depict the daily routine of the Dioscuri, whose lives are marked by heroic deeds, battles, romances, and the voyage of the Argonauts. The large-format canvases shown here, which the artist refers to as “fragments,” also allude to this myth and were created in close dialogue with the work. For the exhibition at Eberbach Monastery, the artist breaks down a complete life story into smaller pieces: into fragments, each focusing on a specific detail of the story. Fragments point to a whole they cannot fully reveal—because it has been divided, destroyed, or lost. Fragments are remnants, beginnings, traces, and echoes all at once.
The exhibition is complemented by drawings and a sculpture that deepen the theme of the fragment and of presence and absence both artistically and philosophically, and explore it from a different perspective.
Many thanks
to our donors
Photos:
Studio Michael Müller, Berlin
Robert Schittko, courtesy Studio Michael Müller
Sven Moschitz
