Peter Blum is pleased to announce the exhibition, Josef Felix Müller: Groping Through the Fine Mist of Sensuousness in the gallery at 99 Wooster Street, SoHo.
This work from 1986 consists of 4 woodcut prints by Josef Felix Müller. They were printed in an edition of 5 impressions by Peter Blum Edition. Three of the woodcuts are 9 x 15 feet and the fourth is 9 x 6.3 feet.
Born in 1955 in Switzerland, Josef Felix Müller’s work is rough-hewn and expressionistic. For his sculpture as well as these prints he selected the chainsaw as his instrument and cut the works from a single piece of wood.
In the case of the woodcuts, the images were cut with a chainsaw into the wood planked floor of the artist’s studio. The immense size of the resulting prints and the videoed “performance” which documents their making lend a dramatic dimension to this work.
The video record, which accompanies this exhibition, underscores the importance to Müller of the creative process. The physicality of wielding the chainsaw adds a performance component as does the improvised group activity needed first to ink the floor with printing rollers, then to place the huge sheets of paper, and lastly to imprint the image by brushing with janitor’s brooms, shuffling with stocking feet or sitting and scooting across the surface of the paper, thus transferring the ink to the paper.
Josef Felix Müller’s exhibitions include the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Musée d’art et d’histoire, Geneva, and the Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel. Müller will be part of a major historic survey exhibition at the Kunsthaus, Zürich: “In the Alps,” October 6, 2006 to January 2, 2007.