Ariane Mueller’s “7 rue des Grands Augustins,” 2023, a series of eight acrylics on canvas, celebrates the joy of painting while also conveying a more complex message. In an oblique commentary on the Spanish Civil War, Mueller calls back to Picasso’s Guernica, 1937. Rather than reproduce aspects of the actual painting, the artist depicts the facade of the studio in which Picasso created the work, transferring an image of the building from one canvas to another and producing compositions that are nearly identical, save for shifts in palette that suggest different seasons and times of day, in a nod to Monet’s paintings of the Rouen Cathedral.

Mueller’s interest isn’t purely formal; her subject matter questions how mediation allows for multiple perceptions of an event. Following the indirect approach of the paintings, the artist drops a series of personal narratives into the accompanying text, which draws on her experiences during the Yugoslav wars and her time at the United Nations’ Nairobi headquarters during the invasion of Iraq. Her reluctance to accept the demands of what she calls the “logic and language” of war grew in response to the patterns she observed in conflicts across the twentieth century, all ultimately driven by profit-seeking agendas.

Through reoccurring forms and subplots in her texts and paintings, Mueller addresses the power of the unspoken, as well as the inherent complexity of adopting a coherent position as an artist and publisher within an ever-shifting constellation of geopolitical tensions.

— Gabriela Acha