Thomas Müllenbach
Born 1949 in Konstanz/D
Lives and works in Zürich/Switzerland
Thomas Müllenbach´s main interest is the ambivalence of the everyday where he finds the subject matter for his meditative paintings. His philosophical work reflects what is expressed in Gertrude Stein´s famous „A Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”. Müllenbach´s paintings are far more than a translation of everyday situations into paint. They are paintings that deal with form, color and light that allow an insight into the preciousness of the everyday and into the incomprehensible of our being as a whole.
In his anti-expressive drawings Müllenbach develops what he himself calls the „purposeless gaze”. Free of pathos, the drawings lead us directly to the coordinates of the modern high-tech world, from the daily activities in a kitchen, by way of the apparatuses in a hospital operating theater, to the navigation instruments in the cockpit of an MD-11 (Bernhard von Waldkirch).