danke Imagination Apartment works

Lukas Müller

Info: Absent faces. Unstirred brows. Sunken eyelids. Lips, crimson or shadow-swept, slightly separated, allowing for yet another breath. In Lukas Müller’s paintings, the Kassel-born artist (1986) first venture back into painting for more than a decade, we are faced with sleepers. Sleepers wholly oblivious to our presence here, in the gallery, watching them. We might notice how their muscles relax or contort. How they lean sideways, guided by fatigue. How an ear, a cheekbone, is rested on an open palm. How a baby’s tiny fist is flexed in the midst of a dream, whilst the other hand is softly brushing against a cheek. What is sleep? A condition of the body and the mind, though this hardly feels adequate. A wrinkled white t-shirt. Miniscule details of ashy eyelids. Concealed eyes searching deep within. Isn’t there something instantly uncanny about watching people sleep? About seeing people depart for someplace else, somewhere hidden? Like several of the German artist’s works, the paintings of sleepers feel like an intrusion of privacy, an ambivalent step a little too deep into the spheres of intimacy. (…)