Slowly but surely an overall picture is emerging for the UHB's appearance at denkmal in Leipzig in November. While the 130 square metre joint stand is the basis and the three-day auction the freestyle, the exhibition of works by the draughtsman Müller is the icing on the cake for the UHB's efforts to put its own stamp on denkmal.
On all three days of the fair, works by the artist Gottfried Müller, born in 1968 in Balingen and professor for architectural representation, will be exhibited in the garden café, which the UHB puts together from the offers of the auction. The special relation of the works to the historical building materials results, among other things, from a series of illustrations and stories about the "melancholy and adventure of house building", with which he has been inventing and documenting in detail previously unimagined, unbuilt and unseen architecture in various works, exhibitions and publications since 2000.
Birkhäuser Verlag has just published a new book that summarizes many of his well-known stories and some new ones. It contains not only the well known individual stories, but also more extensive "documentations" from the series "Fünf aussichtslose Türme" as well as some never before published house reports, the whole on 128 pages in the handy format of 17 x 24 cm.
The peculiarity and autonomy of Müller's works in this category becomes particularly apparent in those moments when readers and viewers are tempted to take the mostly meandering, often bizarre and not infrequently only hair-sharply impossible stories at face value. Not because they seem true to you, but because you wish they were true, despite their not always cheerful, sometimes even tragic biographies of the builders and inhabitants, who are always inseparably interwoven with the stories of the houses.
As an industry whose customers often and quite differently try to create their own dream worlds with historical building materials, the confrontation with Gottfried Müller's works is a kind of emotional and at the same time an intellectual duty. We are delighted that Gottfried Müller, whose works could be seen at the Architecture Biennale in Venice in 2010, at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg in 2012 and at the Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart in 2016, was immediately willing to support our idea of the exhibition as part of our trade fair appearance.
The work of Gottfried Müller
