Megan Cotts / Manfred Müller: As shown on GALLERY PLATFORM LA |

10 August - 28 September 2021
Megan Cotts / Manfred Müller, As shown on GALLERY PLATFORM LA |

ROSEGALLERY is pleased to present a collection of works by Megan Cotts and Manfred Müller, whose work pushes materials to their structural limits as seen on GALLERY PLATFORM LA.

 

  • “I’m interested in making sculptural work that occupies architectural space in a very particular way. To find the right place,...
    Megan Cotts
    Untitled (Golden), 2015
    Tempera on linen, ash wood
    17.5 x 59.5 inches

    “I’m interested in making sculptural work that occupies architectural space in a very particular way. To find the right place, to open spaces up, to get a secret out of a place, this is what thrills me.” - Manfred Müller

    Inquire
  • Megan Cotts
    Megan Cotts
    Untitled (Golden), 2015
    Tempera on linen, ash wood
    17.5 x 59.5 inches

    Megan Cotts

    Megan Cotts lives and works in Los Angeles. Early in her career, while in residency in Berlin, Cotts became fascinated and intrigued with her genealogy and the lives of those before her. Cotts inscribed her own family’s legacy as the originators of honeycomb technology patents in Germany in the early 20th century into her work. These patents included punch-hole cards that were fed into hand-crank machines at her family’s factory to indicate specific designs. As seen in her work Golden, by focusing on this materiality of punch-cards, Cotts invoked her own history by reclaiming intellectual property that had been taken away from her family during the Nazi occupation. This reference to the past reclaims her family’s work while also making it her own. 

  • The punch-hole pieces reflect the tearing apart and weaving of family histories. Honey Honey, 2012 focuses on movement created from...
    Megan Cotts
    Honey, honey, 2012
    Canvas, thead
    38 x 32 inches

    The punch-hole pieces reflect the tearing apart and weaving of family histories. Honey Honey, 2012 focuses on movement created from a two-dimensional form. Through geometrical and tactile folding and marrying of fabric, Cotts finds her practice in her family’s legacy. The repetitive nature of the weaving highlights care and precision. The melding of forms within the piece, brings the similarities to the forefront, but when focused with a keen eye, the idiosyncrasies of each twist and pull display the complexities of the form.

  • Situated between painting and sculpture, the works in Proprius traverse the formal language of architectural minimalism, but are overtly bodily...
    Megan Cotts
    Untitled, 2018
    Tempera and ground glass on linen
    Two panels, each 16 x 26 inches, 32 x 26 inches total

    Situated between painting and sculpture, the works in Proprius traverse the formal language of architectural minimalism, but are overtly bodily in a way that defies strict association with that language. The shapes and textural weight of the work seem to reference the cast concrete forms that skim buildings. At the same time, Cotts’ process—building wooden structures in accordion or hexagonal forms, stretching wet linen taught over the wood, letting it dry, then applying pigment—leaves friction and imperfections that resists the imperviousness of concrete architecture, hinting at a very human physicality. It is difficult to miss the sense of internal structure becoming bone, the way the linen stretches like skin, and the tension of a surface tight with the breaking through of what lies underneath. 

  • Cotts allows the linen to rest somewhere between support and containment. Conceptually and formally, the work plays with ideas of...
    Megan Cotts
    Untitled, 2018
    Tempera and ground glass on linen
    36 x 12 inches

    Cotts allows the linen to rest somewhere between support and containment. Conceptually and formally, the work plays with ideas of transience and permanence, movement and stillness. Each piece is created to hang in any orientation, direction, or configuration, allowing the works to act independently, but also function in service to the space in which they are presented.

     

    Megan Cotts (b. 1979, New York, NY) received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2009. She has exhibited her solo work at Klowden Mann, Dan Graham and Compact Space in Los Angeles, Junior Projects, False Flag, AIR Gallery, and New Release in New York, TSA in Brooklyn, I-A-M Gallery and Atelierhof Kreuzberg in Berlin, and SIA Gallery in Sheffield, England. 

     

  • Manfred Müller

    “If you check in with these pieces every day new ideas come automatically,” says Müller of the paper works. “They flow like a river to the point that it’s impossible to catch up with all I want to do with them. It’s a wonderful problem, of course, but I’m constantly struggling with the question of how I can execute everything that I think of to do with this simple material.” - Manfred Müller

    In his work, Manfred Müller seamlessly converses between negative and positive space. The biomorphic shapes in his White Prelude series, suggest “organic, protozoan” life forms, yet no precise form is depicted. The objects, whether wall bound or freestanding, are non-objective abstractions. However the volumes, shapes, and scale are anthropomorphic and engage viewers as if they were stand-ins for human entities. They are personable presences to be approached by the viewer; they are not shaped objects to be clinically observed so much as formalistic phantoms vaguely referencing the human physique.

     

  • Müller’s works are presented not as frozen and perfected objects. They exist timelessly. His sculptures openly disclose the process of...
    Manfred Müller
    Blue Prelude #3, 2021
    Oil paint on Felt Paper
    22 x 12 x 3 inches
    $ 6,500.00

    Müller’s works are presented not as frozen and perfected objects. They exist timelessly. His sculptures openly disclose the process of their formation. Importance lies in their genesis as much as their present manifestation. To carefully observe a Müller sculpture or constructed paper sketch is to behold every step of its development.

  • "It was my great fortune to come of age as an artist around a man like Beuys, and his influence is evident in my work,” says Müller. “His interest in installation, the care he took to waste nothing, his use of low materials for his work - these are qualities in my work too.” 

    Manfred Müller was born in Düsseldorf, Germany. He apprenticed as a technical draftsman, receiving his state license as an engineering draftsman before he studied visual communication at the university in Düsseldorf. In 1976, he began his studies at the Kunstakademie of Fine Art in Düsseldorf as a master-class student. "It was my great fortune to come of age as an artist around a man like Beuys, and his influence is evident in my work,” says Müller. “His interest in installation, the care he took to waste nothing, his use of low materials for his work - these are qualities in my work too.” 

     

     

     

     

    After leaving the Kunstakademie in 1981 he was awarded a Cité des Artes Scholarship, Paris, France and received the Grand Price for Fine Arts of the City of Düsseldorf in 1983, and the German Industry Endowment of the Arts in 1985. He was selected to be part of the exhibitions Dimensionen IV and Dimensionen V which were shown throughout Germany between 1984-1987. He was one of seven German artists of the inaugural exhibition Boñ Angeles supported by Goethe-Institut, Lufthansa, IBM and the City of Los Angeles to open the new Santa Monica Museum of Art. Since then Müller works as a sculptor in Düsseldorf, Germany and Los Angeles, California.  His work has been shown in France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United States, and Mexico.

     

  • After leaving the Kunstakademie in 1981 he was awarded a Cité des Artes Scholarship, Paris, France and received the Grand...
    Manfred Müller
    Blue Prelude #6, 2021
    Oil paint on Felt Paper
    26.5 x 11 x 3
    $ 8,500.00

    After leaving the Kunstakademie in 1981 he was awarded a Cité des Artes Scholarship, Paris, France and received the Grand Price for Fine Arts of the City of Düsseldorf in 1983, and the German Industry Endowment of the Arts in 1985. He was selected to be part of the exhibitions Dimensionen IV and Dimensionen V which were shown throughout Germany between 1984-1987. He was one of seven German artists of the inaugural exhibition Boñ Angeles supported by Goethe-Institut, Lufthansa, IBM and the City of Los Angeles to open the new Santa Monica Museum of Art. Since then Müller works as a sculptor in Düsseldorf, Germany and Los Angeles, California.  His work has been shown in France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United States, and Mexico.

  • “The fluidity of architectural space and the piercing of boundaries are crucial themes in Müller’s installation pieces. Taking a longer...
    Manfred Müller
    Blue Prelude #1, 2021
    Oil paint on Felt Paper
    18 x 11.5 x 2.5 inches
    $ 6,500.00

    “The fluidity of architectural space and the piercing of boundaries are crucial themes in Müller’s installation pieces. Taking a longer view, however, it’s apparent that the inter-relation between his various bodies of work is equally important to him. Whereas artists often. Make preparatory drawings and studies for larger works, Müller tends to make smaller works after the large works have been created.” - Kristine McKenna, Any Given Shape 

     

    Recently selected solo and group exhibitions include: Not from Here, ROSEGALLERY, Los Angeles, 2017; Objects Are Closer Than They Appear, Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, 2014; Framing Abstraction: Mark, Symbol, Signifier, Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, 2011; Heliotropo, Galería López Quiroga, Mexico City, Mexico, 2010. 

  • For any inquiries please email sophi@rosegallery.net or give us a call at 310.264.8440. As always, we love to hear from you!