Palindrome: Lukas Müller alongside selected works by artists of the gallery

With the exhibition Palindrome, German artist Lukas Müller presents a series of new paintings that unfold within the blurry space somewhere between realism and surrealism. A space in which the recognisable is continuously, if only slightly, displaced; where the logic of everyday life is unsettled, and where the dreamlike permeates the image. For Müller, it is precisely in this borderland - what he himself describes as a blind spot - that the energy of an image emerges. Here, painting is neither a direct reflection of reality nor a pure construction of fantasy, but rather a site where the two intertwine.

 

The exhibition title, Palindrome, functions as both metaphor and method. A palindrome moves symmetrically in both directions. The same reciprocity underpins Müller's working process. While working on one of the new works, a sentence spontaneously surfaced in his consciousness:

This statement articulates a key dimension of Müller's practice: painting is not merely something to be interpreted; it is something that itself interprets the viewer standing before it. Meaning becomes a movement back and forth between image and beholder - like a palindrome that only reveals its meaning once one realises that it can be read in both directions.

 

It is central to Müller that painting communicates across languages and cultural backgrounds. As he describes it an image can,  articulate something deeply personal while simultaneously carrying universal potential, precisely because it is not bound to verbal clarity. This creates an intimacy between work and viewer, in which the viewer's own experiences, emotions, and dreams are activated in the encounter with the image.

 

The new works often draw on concrete situations and observations from Müller's everyday life: objects, people, landscapes, fleeting moods. At the same time, his experienced reality is permeated by dreams, imaginings, and mental images that are just as present as physical objects. In the paintings, these layers are not separated; they slide in and out of one another.

 

Proportions are distorted,  spaces are bent out of shape, and objects carry symbolic weight and meaning. The clear contours of realism open up through a surreal logic, in which the dreamlike dimension does not appear as an addition but as an integral part of reality itself. In this way, Müller unfolds a visual field in which the familiar gradually slips from its stable position and appears both intimate and strange at the same time: uncanny, or unheimlich.

 

A central example is the work Stine of Denmark, wherein Müller experiments with a collage-like technique that destabilises space in subtle yet insistent ways. The painting is suffused with blue tones, almost as if illuminated from within. Perspectives shift, fragments of space collide, and figures are suggested rather than described. The surrealist themes here do not manifest in the grotesque or the bizarre, but in a quiet, intense sensation that something in the image is out of its habitual order. A dramaturgy of dreams.

 

It is precisely this dreamlike quality that lends the works their surrealist character. Müller allows his motifs to emerge as image fragments pressing outward from within, from what he himself describes as an inner reservoir of dreams, memories, and mental images. Threads of surrealism form an active part of his practice; here, images can arise across logical connections and instead follow associative or automatic ideas. This process mirrors surrealism's original ambition: to open consciousness and give form to that which normally eludes linguistic or rational structure.

 

Yet in Müller's work, this is not a return to the aesthetics of the 1920s. Rather, it is an investigation of how surrealist methods can still function within contemporary image culture, where the boundaries between reality, imagination, and digitally filtered images are constantly dissolving. The reality to which the paintings initially seem to belong is quietly undermined: colours become emotional, light appears to emanate from unknown sources, and motifs acquire a dreamlike friction that places the viewer in a state between recognition and disorientation. Ordinary things - a vase, a door, a hand, a piece of fabric - begin to radiate a meaning beyond their use value. The objects become charged without losing their material presence. In the end, one is reminded in equal measure of Hammershøi's interior paintings or René Magritte's series L'Empire des lumières.