Armin Mueller-Stahl

Opening: Friday, 7 July 2017, from 6 to 9 pm
The artist will be present.
 
Armin Mueller-Stahl is not only an internationally known actor, a highly gifted musician, and a successful author. He also has been painting and drawing for more than six decades. His pictures, however, he first showed them to the public in the year of 2001. Creative imagination and a trained eye lead him to unmistakable interpretations in his pictorial art, too. The Salongalerie “Die Möwe” dedicates the painter Armin Mueller-Stahl a special exhibition, from 8 July to 23 September 2017. The artist will attend the opening on 7 July. The exhibition is introduced by Stefan Skowron, art scholar and publicist.
 
Shakespeare’s plays accompany Armin Mueller-Stahl’s stage career, and they also inspire him as a painter. “Die Möwe” is the first gallery to present paintings from his latest series ‘Shakespear’s girls and women’. These works, going back to Heinrich Heine’s text of the same name from 1838, show famous characters from plays by the English playwright, as Lady Gray, Cleopatra, and Anne Boleyn. In this series, however, the painter is less focussed on the description of the respective characters; he rather dissolves Shakespeare’s heroines in an area of colours, in favour of a new, independent pictorial poetry.
 
In his pictorial works of art, Armin Mueller-Stahl’s portrait homages pay tribute to leading figures in the fields of music, literature and philosophy, of theatre and politics. Thus, the exhibition includes i.a. portraits of Goethe and Schiller, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Joseph Beuys, the Beatles, David Bowie, Bob Dylan, Mahatma Gandhi and Willy Brandt. Generosity in the flow of lines, characteristic body language and facial play, as well as an always surprising vividness mark these images of men.
 
The landscapes, too, prove Armin Mueller-Stahl’s capacity as meticulous observer. Not only do they show a remarkable place, often important for the artist in a biographical connection, they also reflect his feelings. In his colour silk-screen print “An autumn morning in Berlin” he, for instance, visualizes the city of his long, successful activities.