Whitney Biennial 2017

Floor 5

Born 1971 in Brixlegg, Austria
Lives in Brooklyn, NY

Throughout her career, Ulrike Müller has explored issues of gender and queer experience, and questioned how collaboration can trouble fixed notions of identity. Those commitments manifest subtly in her installation for the 2017 Biennial, which Müller sited in a transitional space, a passageway that she extended, painted, and transformed to create an almost sculptural presence. With its diverse elements, the artist intends to make viewers’ bodily experiences a meaningful part of the installation. For example, a series of works on paper—quirkily libidinous riffs on modernist abstraction—makes emphatic use of the brush, playing off the idea that the implement is an extension of the hand. Müller’s highly tactile enamel paintings, which she fires onto industrial steel plates, reflect the weather and the viewer in their glassy surfaces, bringing their surroundings into the works.