ARIANNE MÜLLER | SCHIEFE ZÄHNE | ARTFORUM | CRITICS’ PICK

Ariane Mueller’s “7 rue des Grands Augustins,” 2023, a series of eight acrylics on canvas, celebrates the joy of painting while also conveying a more complex message. In an oblique commentary on the Spanish Civil War, Mueller calls back to Picasso’s Guernica, 1937. Rather than reproduce aspects of the actual painting, the artist depicts the facade of the studio in which Picasso created the work, transferring an image of the building from one canvas to another and producing compositions that are nearly identical, save for shifts in palette that suggest different seasons and times of day, in a nod to Monet’s paintings of the Rouen Cathedral. [ read more … ]