Classic paintings have a foreground and a background. So is wallpaper on the wall the background for what takes place in the room? Or is the wallpaper already the event and the background the architecture in which it is located? Bastian Muhr poses these questions to us. But much more than that. By placing selected works, i.e., classic images, on the wallpaper, he brings new levels into play. Literally, i.e., spatially, but also in terms of content, by creating connections between the “images.”

He creates the wallpapers himself using a “wallpaper machine, ” an algorithm that determines the course of the pattern, either linearly or randomly, by arbitrarily placing predetermined elements next to each other. Similar to Muhr's pencil drawings, whose structure is continued by rolling dice (completely analog by hand), a component comes into play that allows system and chance to enter into dialogue.

Bastian Muhr tests our perception by intervening in the space and architecture that it offers us. As in Zickzack, his floor work in the project space in 2016 (https://museum-wiesbaden.de/bastian-muhr), a linear structure forms a kind of net that slides between the wall and the spatial continuum.