Armin Mueller-Stahl | SICH FINDEN IM GEGENÜBER | ARTES Berlin | 11.05.-29.06.2024

until 29.06. | #4194ARTatBerlin | ARTES Berlin shows from 11. May 2024 the exhibition  SICH FINDEN IM GEGENÜBER by the artist Armin Mueller-Stahl.

He is a Hollywood star from Germany: Armin Mueller-Stahl. The actor, musician, writer and painter has fans all over the world. In our ARTES Berlin gallery, we are showing more than 50 works by the artist in a wide-ranging exhibition.

We know Armin Mueller-Stahl as a versatile artist in acting, music and painting as well as an astute social observer. He has always accepted this responsibility as an artist, as Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier recently stated in a speech about the artist. Mueller-Stahl himself once described it as follows: “Better a kink in my career than in my spine”.

When he signed the open letter against the expatriation of Wolf Biermann in 1976, it meant the end of his career in the former GDR. However, Mueller-Stahl did not allow his art, his skills and his success to be taken away from him, but simply took them with him: to West Germany in 1980, later to reunified Germany, then to Hollywood in the USA and all over the world.

Armin Mueller-Stahl moves between countries as well as between artistic disciplines, all of which he masters masterfully. The artist himself once described his profession as a “bridge builder” – an extraordinary artistic approach that creates connections and transcends borders. This cosmopolitan attitude also makes Mueller-Stahl’s paintings nationally and internationally great art that endures.

In the interplay between individual experiences and an interest in others, Armin Mueller-Stahl’s touching images of people are created in the spirit of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s idea that “it is the essence of man to recognize himself in another”. With his talent for empathizing with different life stories and characters, the artist creates authentic and profound, yet very personal paintings that are unparalleled in recent art history.

Mueller-Stahl’s works reveal a great affinity for drawing and painting the subtle nuances of human faces and the traits hidden within them. “This is where the artist’s talent as an actor becomes concretely visible, to fathom characters, to empathize with them and at the same time to capture situations atmospherically and to transfer them with painterly means,” says Lucie Klysch, curator of the ARTES Berlin gallery, “the attention and the honest interest in the inner being of a counterpart – that is what also distinguishes Mueller-Stahl as a painter. His art conveys a message of empathy and understanding that encourages us to overcome our own biases.”

From oil and acrylic paints to charcoal and pencil – every brushstroke, every line is well-considered and also exemplary of a practical memory work: for the artist’s dialog with himself in a different time and role, as well as his ego as a counterpart.

With the complexity of his artistic expression, Armin Mueller-Stahl represents an exceptional phenomenon in the art of the 20th and early 21st centuries. “It is this unique ability to combine beauty and depth that has prompted us to show an extensive cross-section of his work,” emphasizes Lucie Klysch.

The more than 50 pictures in the exhibition were selected together with Armin Mueller-Stahl and the publisher Frank-Thomas Gaulin, who has accompanied the artist for many decades.

“We are particularly proud to present Mueller-Stahl’s latest cycle of works, Jewish Fates, Friends and Companions, in this form for the first time in a gallery exhibition,” says Klysch. On display are a large number of personalities from the Jewish community, including prominent figures from art, culture, politics and science, such as Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, Hannah Ahrendt and Billy Wilder. Each portrait tells a story of survival and resistance, of cultural diversity and intellectual brilliance, of personal friendship and solidarity, of a counterpart in whom we can seek and find ourselves at any time.