One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others,
by means of love, friendship, and compassion.
? Simone de Beauvoir
By this yardstick Sofie Muller’s work has incalculable worth. For Muller’s extraordinary practice is simultaneously, both a humble expression of compassion, of love and an ambitious statement on the frailties and tenacity of the human condition.
In a global political climate that is collapsing into the most inarticulate binary positions, Muller’s own articulation of the human condition is conscious and nuanced. Free of dogma and strained argument, Muller embraces venerable yet flawed materials – that together with her uncommon facility, manifest objects, both sculptures and paintings, that are immediately affiliated with the long arc of herstory.
Yet for all their alliance with precedence, these works assert a powerful immediacy and relevance that feels demanded by this moment. Her works capacity to utterly transcend time, inadvertently mocking the flimsiness of fashion with its intimate, humanitarian symbolism is enormously affecting.
The full-sized bronzes, Watchboy and Watchgirl reach out for the other, their faces remain essentially calm. There is no sense of panic – the confusion and angst that we sighted-ones feel immediately our vision is occluded. They navigate their way through the world aided by their compensatory and enlivened senses of touch and hearing. The title Muller has chosen is of course ironic, but the reality is that these two appear to be watching over each other, albeit without the convenience of sight.
There is a prosaic modelling in the forms, their adolescent figures have yet to gain the structure of adulthood. Their simple clothing, with its reduced Antwerpian tonal range and their bare feet simplify, humanize their presence, forcing our concentration on their calm countenance.
One can’t help but feel that their affliction bestows a heightened awareness in and between them. The ease of vision makes us lazy, and, in its absence, knowledge is cultivated not by what one sees but by what one feels.
Originally commissioned for a children’s psychiatric hospital the figures also act as guardians. Their wide embrace is a protective gesture they stand guard over the facility – strong and unexpectedly resolute.
It is a bewildering contradiction that the best art often enters the body, less through the eyes, but rather, by sensory stealth. As obligated as our eyes are to receive, they are pre-conditioned to deceive. Though Mark Twain quipped that “nothing spoils a good story than the arrival of an eyewitness,” the reality is that eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable, and vision becomes the easy bedfellow of fiction, especially when weakened by desire. As reality and narrative wilfully entwine in search of substance it becomes apparent that truth, and with it, meaning have largely been sacrificed.
Muller understands these risks and uses an extended sensory arsenal to restore or rather reconstitute meaning through material. Alabaster and oil paint are hardly compliant materials, but their resistance demands time and with that duration comes a new actuality.
Sofie Muller will be in Sydney for the first time for her second solo show with the galleries. She and Andrew Jensen will discuss the works at 2pm on Saturday 11th October, and touch on her project The Clean Room, which was displayed at the National Museum of Archaeology in Valletta and commissioned by La Musée, which won the prize for the best pavilion at the inaugural Malta Biennale.
Andrew Jensen, October 2025 |
