Surreal Emptiness

By: Kate Hackman
May 2001
Kansas City Star


On view in the back gallery at Leedy-Voulkos are the smart, challenging recent paintings of German-born artist Armin Mühsam, which provide a more conceptual and decidedly post-modern counterpoint to Butt's expressions. Although reared in Munich, Mühsam earned a master of fine arts in painting from Montana State University in Bozeman in 1997 and is currently assistant professor of art at Northwest Missouri State University.

While perhaps best described as landscapes, Mühsam's paintings depict an eerie, imagined world marked by the impact of modern technologies. Uninhabited, their surreal emptiness and deliberate artificiality (often furthered by keyed up color) recall the work of Giorgio de Chirico. Yet, while Mühsam speaks to a tendency to exchange one set of "machines" for the next in the name of efficiency (which might characterize the entire 20th century), his well-crafted paintings evidence distinctly contemporary iconography. Alongside abandoned bridges and excavation holes, satellite dishes emit signals to far-off receptors.

Throughout Mühsam's work runs a sense of abandonment of the once cherished and new. Bridges or dikes leading off to distant horizons end abruptly in the foreground, telephone lines criss-cross to form abstract patterns across the sky, seemingly disconnected from any function. These traces of man's intervention are set into sweeping vistas, juxtaposed against verdant rolling hills and clusters of deep green trees and bushes, so as to amplify their constructed nature as well as to highlight the notion that we are constantly manipulating the landscape to suit our wants and needs.

What makes these works so engaging, ultimately, is the undeniable beauty Mühsam achieves in spite of the disconcerting strangeness of the sites he depicts. As the artist states, "when I paint an artificial landscape in the most beautiful manner possible I challenge people to reconsider their expectations of beauty."