BERLIN.- “One can, and of this I am convinced, only ever begin in the middle.” So begins the autofictional short story “Between July and October,” written by Alex Müller while she was still a student and read aloud in class in 2001. Until 2025, it was never heard or read again. Along with other materials and objects that Müller finds, collects, receives as gifts, dismantles, or rescues, it forms a kind of archive. Like a seed in the ground, this short story waited for a moment when it could come to light again and be transformed by the artist into something else: in this case, a pair of white double-jeans dangling from the wall with four legs over three meters long. They look like birch trunks, and Müller handwritten the entire story from 2001 onto them—like a seemingly endless, obsessive bark of writing.

Like everything in Müller’s collection, this story is part of a body of work that deals with what is remembered and forgotten, what is physically and psychologically inscribed in us, in matter, in our relationships, souls, and societies. “Yesterday is Today,” Müller’s exhibition title, could imply both: that without memories, without an awareness of the past, there is no today—but also that our today is already the yesterday that future generations will look back on.

Müller transforms archival material, personal objects, and found pieces into paintings, sculptures, and installations that are “in the middle,” where different layers of time merge with one another but also contradict each other. The 2026 work “Yesterday is Today” is a tapestry made of black velvet upon which Müller has painted with bleach—a memory of the artist’s bedroom that looks like a kind of paranormal X-ray. Next to a bed and a drying rack, Müller appears with many sagging breasts, like Artemis, goddess of the hunt, the forest, the moon, and childbirth—or like a bodily perception of menopause. In Müller’s work, the mystical and the profane are closely interwoven; nothing is trivial. At the same time, her practice penetrates deep into art and contemporary history. Yet the material she uses to alter matter and consciousness is always infused with personal history, with painterly references to Modernism and post-war Modernism, with time and transience, repressed female history, corporality, and sexuality.

In a sound installation featuring the noises of copulating pigeons and a curtain piece made of embroidered linen that lay outdoors for months, Müller explores the German slang concept of “vögeln” (screwing/birding). Her painting “Hedda’s Lust Now” is based on a portrait of Müller’s great-great-aunt, who appears here costumed like an ink-blue sister of Rousseau’s “The Snake Charmer.” The painting echoes the work of the Fauves and the German Expressionists, as well as the exotic-colonial dreams of the dawning 20th century. Müller’s practice carries something shamanic. The way she exposes materials to weathering, bleaches them, and seals them in wax calls to mind Joseph Beuys or Kai Althoff. The nutcrackers, sealed with a skin of paper and arranged in a mid-century vitrine, look like totems from the post-war era. Her masterful painting is physical, full of traces, stains, quotes, and cross-references. At the same time, it appears ghostly and timeless—a yesterday that is incredibly present.

Text: Oliver Koerner von Gustorf