Poten­tielle Nor­malien­samm­lung. Reto Müller Arrest­ing Frag­ments of the World.

Start­ing with the fas­ci­na­tion for the clear atti­tude of mod­ernism, expressed in archi­tec­ture as a “con­structed idea”, the artist Reto Müller (*1984, lives and works in Schaffhausen) devel­ops a new group of works. His approach to mod­ernism, how­ever, is frag­ile. Back­drop, model, façade as well as copy and vari­a­tion are key­words for his work. Also the title of the exhi­bi­tion – «poten­tielle Nor­malien­samm­lung» (poten­tial col­lec­tion of stan­dard­ized items) reflects pos­si­bil­i­ties rather than real­i­sa­tion. For his first insti­tu­tional solo-show, Müller reacts to the her­itage of early mod­ernist archi­tec­ture in Switzer­land, par­tic­u­larly in Lan­gen­thal: Willy Boe­siger, a close con­fi­dant of Le Cor­busier and editor of his cat­a­logue raisonné, built a rad­i­cal mod­ernist edi­fice in 1928 for his father’s car­pen­ter work­shop in Lan­gen­thal. Present and future of such build­ings are Müller’s start­ing point for his new videos. In the exhi­bi­tion, the videos are com­bined with cast con­crete, basalt or tin reliefs. With these exam­ples of solid­i­fi­ca­tion and stan­dard­iza­tion, he exam­ines ques­tions of model-making, mod­u­lar­ity and human scale. A pub­li­ca­tion is pub­lished on the occa­sion of the exhibition.

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