Art and Acting
Feeling films—this phrase fits Armin Mueller-Stahl’s artistic exploration of his own filmic work. He is not interested in specific scenes or cinematic plots. Rather, it is moods and atmospheres that he paints and draws from memory, sometimes simultaneously with film productions, sometimes sometime after the shooting days. This is particularly evident in the paintings based on the film adaptation of Dan Brown’s novel Illuminati, which are largely non-representational and abstract.
But even when Mueller-Stahl works in a highly figurative manner, as in his 2004 lithography cycle Night on Earth—Day on Earth, he is extremely interested in a non-linear narrative structure. The prints were created more than ten years after Jim Jarmusch’s episodic film Night on Earth (1991), in which Mueller-Stahl plays a former East German clown who works as a taxi driver in New York. While the film exclusively shows nocturnal encounters between taxi drivers and their customers in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome and Helsinki, Mueller-Stahl's sheets emphasize the subtle, poetic and often tragicomic fleetingness of these moments between people who are actually strangers to each other.