Jan Muche
Agora

Author(s)

Christoph Tannert, Günter Baumann

Design

Susanne Bax

Cover

Clothbound hardcover with dust jacket

Size

24 x 30 cm

Pages

112

Illustrations

82

Language(s)

English, German

ISBN

978-3-96912-002-6

Tracing the Wear of the Life of Labor

The visual art of Jan Muche (b. 1975, Herford; lives and works in Berlin) revolves around forms that bring to mind structural steelwork, giant industrial installation components, or scaffolding. His constructivist-abstract paintings and sculptures look back on steel as a symbol of industrialization and the working class, which featured in unflappably cheerful and adulatory depictions that were characteristic of the twentieth century’s ideologies – Communism, Stalinism, National Socialism, actually existing Socialism. Muche’s roughhewn aesthetic combines proletarian charm with the spirit of onward and upward, taking the beholder to regions not untinged by dissonance. This book, supported by the Leinemann-Stiftung für Bildung und Kunst, brings his reflections on the significance of work and the impact of digital technology on physical toil as well as his engagement with yesteryear’s “heroes of labor” into focus.

Jan Muche trained as lithographer and studied with Karl Horst Hödicke at the Hochschule der Künste Berlin.

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Franz Erhard Walther
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Subtotal
68
Total
68