Reinhard Mucha, born in Düsseldorf in 1950, could be summed up in this formula with his “model making.” The potential of the matter is his raw material, the potential to radiate neuralgic emotional states with a sculptural frequency all its own. Filing cabinets, index card boxes, historical furniture—for Mucha, not “yesterday’s news,” not “the end of the story” (from the arsenal of his titles), but the beginning of his own new arrangements, reconfigured and thus abstracted. Freed from the original functional context of everyday life, in which they have served their purpose, literally cut free, things become the building blocks for mostly sculptural formal inventions that stand for themselves, namely as art. Including axiomatic achievements, such as the legacy of Marcel Duchamp, i.e. the significance of even the choice of an object, as well as the unconditional belief in the narrative power of the material à la Joseph Beuys, the expansion of the artistic field through conceptual art, and the stock of forms of minimalism. Mucha deconstructs this pool of ideas into its component parts, as he does with other materials, in order to then reintegrate individual components into the work — transformed with his assistance. For example, he recodes the formal language of minimal art, its clean self-referentiality, into a display of individual experience. In typical Mucha fashion, this display character then becomes his subject again, to which he adds footnotes of self-reflection, for example when he “shows” works in works as inserts, thus thematizing the exhibition itself through their co-exhibition.
