This article first appeared in the Berlin Art Week 2025 special issue of Freitag.
Whatever everyday life places in her hands becomes material for art. In her recent solo ›Alexandraplatz‹ at Zitadelle Spandau, Alex Müller demonstrated the breadth of her practice, moving fluidly from painting to kinetic sculpture. The installation ›From the Hand to the Wall‹, first shown there, gathers 340 letters sent by Müller’s family from the GDR to her father in the West. During Berlin Art Week, her Berlin gallery, Haverkampf Leistenschneider, is presenting the work again in the group show ›Hallen 06‹ at Wilhelm Hallen in Reinickendorf—just metres from the place where her father fled East for West in 1961.
der Freitag: Your last exhibition ›Alexandraplatz‹ at the Zitadelle Spandau included fifty-six works. Your practice is fairly comprehensive, isn’t it?
Alex Müller: What I draw on depends on life itself. If you don’t move much, not much comes to you. My work has always had autobiographical elements, which I’ve combined with research: films by Peter Greenaway and Stanley Kubrick, for example, or texts by Molière. Experience comes first, not just autobiography. At art school I once crocheted the highest mountain on Madeira after climbing it. One thousand one hundred and eighty-three metres. Later it became a sphere.
It’s not as big as one might imagine. You showed it again at Kunsthalle Nürnberg in 2023.
That piece means a lot to me. I’m starting to focus more and more on everyday life, and on lived experience paired with what we think of as memory. That’s what makes people who they are. It’s in the everyday that vitality begins. You could call it a kind of positive memory radicalism.
Is remembering a kind of filtering?
Memory isn’t arbitrary. What resurfaces has a lot to do with our experience in the present moment. It often comes back unexpectedly. A lot of artists are exploring memory in their work right now. Day-to-day life shapes who we are. The people sitting over there. The way you and I are sitting here talking. That’s crucial. It’s through this that we can effect change. It’s not just about showing something. It’s about what happens in the moment.
For Berlin Art Week you’re showing your installation ›From the Hand to the Wall‹ in the Wilhelm Hallen. It’s made from the letters you inherited from your father. What’s the story behind it?
I grew up in Düren. Even though it was six hundred and seventy kilometres away, the Wall was a constant topic of conversation. My father fled East Germany at the age of seventeen; my grandmother never forgave him for it. In Düren, he was »the refugee«. The Wall was always a presence in our lives through parcels sent to my aunt, cousins and grandparents, and through letters from my grandparents and aunts to my father.
Why did your father leave?
Family conflict. He didn’t get along with his father and craved freedom. Today, just one hundred and eighty metres from the S-Bahn station where he climbed over the fence, you’ll find the Wilhelm Hallen. It’s absurd that I’m exhibiting there now. When I was one and a half, my mother took me there for the first time to meet the family. My grandparents lived in a block of flats only four hundred and fifty metres from the Wilhelm Hallen. The exhibition venue is right next to where those letters were written. Showing them there now feels like a kind of closure and gives them a sense of universality.
Three hundred and forty letters from a family in the East to a son in the West. Written across divided countries, filled with everyday details and reproaches. You printed these letters on cushions and hung them on the wall.
Letters I also appear in. My life begins in this depiction of the others. I had the letters printed on washable cotton and stuffed them like seat cushions. We don’t sit on history, we take it in our hands. As a confrontation. This work is an invitation to do that. It’s not meant as a monument or a place to rest. It’s an echo.
There’s also a sound piece.
I developed it with the composer Alexander Wienand. For it I read out the headings and dates of the letters, the way my grandmother kept trying to avoid repetition. She would write alternately “My dear son”, “My dear, dear son”, “My little boy”. Formality and variation.
You travelled to the GDR several times a year until you were a teenager.
The GDR became a kind of home because I was there so often—at Easter, in the summer holidays. I jumped off the ten-metre diving board for the first time in the Pankow swimming pool. There wasn’t one in Düren. I don’t know how many times I went to the cinema in Wilhelmsruh. I even wanted to move to the GDR. I thought it was much better there. My grandmother worked at a bakery, there were always streuselschnecken pastries and I loved going shopping at the Konsum.
And did you also see the differences in a negative light?
I always tried to dress so I wouldn’t stand out as a so-called Westschnecke. I wore my oldest Adidas trainers. I cut the labels off my jeans because I wanted to be part of the community.
And did it work?
The older we got, the less it did. Eventually I didn’t want to go to the GDR anymore. My friends joined the FDJ (Freie Deutsche Jugend, the GDR youth organisation), the boys went into the army. I became more and more aware of the situation. My grandparents suffered deeply because my father had left, and I was more or less sent as a kind of »Wiedergutmacheengel« (angel of reconciliation); that’s also the title of a piece I showed opposite the letters at the Zitadelle: a leather jacket I inherited from my father, together with the postage stamps I attached to it.
Do you believe in transgenerational trauma?
What do you mean believe? I’ve experienced it.
Your work is narrative. Is there a difference between your painting and your sculpture? Does the storytelling work differently?
It’s like the difference between eating muesli and eating a slice of bread. My starting point is painting and drawing. But I never wanted to limit myself. There are cycles when I focus more on painting, and when that phase ends, an installation idea might emerge. Or I write. I’ve been working with poetry for a long time.
What’s the nicest thing anyone has ever written or said about your art?
When my son was six, he stood in my studio and said: »We can’t hang that painting, it’s far too beautiful.« I think that was the best compliment.
The critic Oliver Koerner von Gustorf wrote in ›Monopol‹ that your paintings should be hanging in international museums.
I think so too. That’s beautiful in a different way.
There’s a large notebook in front of you. What do you write in it?
I always start my books from the back. I jot down ideas, things I research, things I might use, things that sound plausible to me.
Sketches too?
I tend to do those on separate pieces of paper.
What becomes a painting, what becomes a sculpture?
When I paint, I need resistance. I start, then put the painting aside and think, »Right, that’s failed.« Then comes the moment when I pick the painting up again. I see it afresh and can respond. For me, that’s resistance; there’s already an assertion there. This often leads me where I need to go. Not always, but very often.
You work with ink.
I don’t like oil paint; the texture is too creamy for me. I think it goes back to my mother rubbing Bebe cream into my face when I was young. I can still remember her technique.
There’s everyday life again.
There’s a wonderful Hannah Arendt quote about biography: » A characteristic of human action is that it always begins something new.« This has been my guiding principle in many areas over the past few years. I don’t want to reinvent the wheel; I just want to help keep it turning. What I do is an echo. My work opens up a view onto something we don’t yet know, and that sense of not knowing is so important right now. Not knowing what might happen at an exhibition, for example. The subjunctive.
Have you ever been ashamed of the autobiographical elements in your work?
No, it requires a certain kind of curiosity, which isn’t always comfortable. I want to know a lot about people, even in friendships. I’m interested in people. You can’t be afraid of what that might bring out.
›Alex Müller: From the Hand to the Wall‹, Hallen 06, 6—14 SEP 2025