Der Mucha – An Initial Suspicion at Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf, establishes Reinhard Mucha as one of Germany’s most estimable living artists

To grow up in Germany in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, as Reinhard Mucha did – he was born in 1950 in the city that now hosts this weighty two-venue retrospective – was to do so in a present tangled horrendously but silently with the past. Many Germans – teachers, politicians, judges – were former Nazis; still in place, too, were Holocaust-enabling infrastructure like chemical industries and, crucially for numerous artworks that Mucha would come to make, the railway network. The ‘economic miracle’ or Wirtschaftswunder that began during the 1950s had rehabilitated those supposed qualities of ‘Germanness’ (rigid discipline and willing subordination, an obsession with precision and order) that Nazism had grotesquely fetishised. And nobody was talking about any of it, or about the war. In the face of this, though, Mucha’s art over the last four decades – from small, plangent arrangements of used footstools to a full-size Ferris wheel fashioned from metal ladders, office chairs and desks and fluorescent lights, lashed together with electrical cords – is not concerned with voicing the unsaid, or not quite. It asks how you make art about, or around, what can’t ever be come to terms with, even were it to be addressed; it wonders how form might intercede with the unspeakable.

Η συνέχεια εδώ.