The Städel Museum is dedicating a major exhibition to one of Germany's best-known artists, Andreas Mühe, whose photographs deal with sociological, historical and political themes, which he elaborately stages with light contrasts in special settings. Until June 19, 2022, the Städel will show around 45 works by the artist, including well-known and unknown work cycles from his oeuvre to date, as well as the series Biorobots II (2021), presented for the first time. In his works, Mühe deals with attribution to collective categories such as family, nationality, politics, or culture as a construct of a social order. Iconic are his portraits of Angela Merkel, whom he accompanied on several trips as German chancellor and whose habitus he analyzed in a catchy way. The extent to which these photographs are determined by a political visual language becomes clear in other photographs of the chancellor, in which the artist's mother can be seen as a double. What is real, what is staged, becomes blurred - both in the official and in the re-enacted photographs.
Even Mühe's houses of the SED leadership photographed in Wandlitz look like dummies in the dark surrounding space and do not reveal their historical role. Mühe uses a large-format camera, which requires a complex composition due to its heavy handling. With pointed aesthetics, he shows historical events or their locations in a supra-temporal restaging. He is not looking for images, but images in which he can reinterpret the given content - people, architecture or landscapes. Playing with the viewer's visual habits, Muehe's works join Städel works by his fellow photographers Rodney Graham or Thomas Demand.
