Surrealistic Landscapes

By: Alice Thorson
June 2007
Kansas City Star


Imagine a 21st-century De Chirico set in the flatness of the American plains.

At the Kansas City Artists Coalition, Armin Mühsam's visions of abandoned technological detritus in outdoor settings have exactly this feel.

It's an ambitious show from the Romanian-born artist, an assistant professor of art at Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville. The exhibition comprises more than 30 paintings, watercolors and drawings.

The sheer volume of work imparts urgency to Mühsam's theme of our powerful but self-destructive relationship to the environment.

Among the most compelling pieces are a series of charcoal and acrylic drawings that could have been ripped from the pad of a futuristic civil engineer. But Mühsam's handling endows these lifeless scenes of dikes, tunnels, power lines, trenches and tanks with a formal grace and expressiveness that transcend deadpan architectural draftsmanship.

Shading, hatching and washy passages index the artist's hand and hint at an underlying emotional relationship with his topic.

An intriguing group of acrylic paintings titled, simply, "Compositions," presents boxy prefab construction components, including a highway overpass, like minimalist sculptures in the landscape. Overbearing, mannered, even distracting, the gestural paint handling Mühsam brings to their desolate surroundings exists in tension with the simple geometric forms of his manmade subjects.

Yet it feels right - with "wild" paint acting as agent of wild nature, vowing to reassert itself over the encroachments of cement and steel.

Mühsam's visions offer a painful, 21st-century contrast with the 20th-century Precisionists' view of the industrial landscape as a source of promise, productivity and pride. And their astringency sets them apart from the imaginary landscapes of other contemporary artists, seen in profusion in the Kemper Museum's current "Phantasmania" show.