Tamara Muller

Tamara Muller (1975, NL)

'Tamara Muller's work is a revealing and fearless portrait of 'the self', but at the same time holds up a mirror to us.'

The faces in my work are my own. They are not self-portraits in the fundamental sense of the word. I play a role, but it is complex. This shoots back and forth between combinations of man, woman, adult, child, human, animal, perpetrator and victim. Because parts of the canvas are left unfinished with simple brush strokes, attention is mainly drawn to the characters who almost always look at the viewer. . The work is only finished when someone looks at it and becomes aware of their own thoughts. I don't want to tell a clear story. No clarity, but an interaction between apparent contradictions; the personal and the universal, reality and fiction, realism and abstraction. Ambivalent in both form and content, the image and canvas are manipulated to make the viewer a co-player in this painted 'stick and cut' theater about power, guilt and shame.

I paint “The game of life”, the humor and the pain, the moving imperfections of humanity.

‘Tamara Muller’s faces are almost always her own. They are stylized but rendered with an uncanny realism. Other parts of the canvas may be blocked in with simple brushwork or even left unfinished, because it is those faces that matter. They are not self portraits in the basic sense. Each one is a role although the role itself is sometimes vague, flickering between man, animal, woman, child, seducer, victim, sometimes combinations of two or more. There is a tension in them, between the presumed innocence of youth and the transgressive desires and guilt of adulthood. This disturbing psychological dichotomy is carefully balanced by a visualsense of wit and humor. Tamara Muller’s work is an unfolding and unflinching portrait of theself. And the accumulating body of that work is continually adding weight to its depth.”