Every now and then a new colour emerges in Thomas Müller's oeuvre. Amongst his most recent drawings it is a vivid orange. Applied in rotund vigorous blobs of Indian ink, the composition and application link back to a period when Müller introduced forceful shapes, mostly in black ink. Müller’s familiar motifs of softly meandering nettings in acrylic, pencil and pastel were overpainted and reworked with bold shapes; gently flowing compositions were partly obliterated by black ink or coated with layers of silver colour pencil and diluted acrylic, which equipped Müller's drawings with great new expressive power.
When considering Thomas Müller’s oeuvre, the idea of the gesture in its many variations comes to mind first, the experimental exploration of the line, yet the impact and importance of colour cannot be underestimated. The purple and orange pastels, the electric and olive green, the dark purple oils, and of course the idiosyncratic ball-point pen drawings, are pillars in Müller’s work, always reappearing, looping in and out of existing conversations and new dialogues. Müller is not a colourist, but the considered introduction of colours makes their choice one of the essentials of the artist’s achievements that lifts his drawings to another dimension.
A dark purple ink was introduced not too long ago, and now the vibrant orange, both often appearing in punchy open grid structures reminiscent of Müller’s small-size drawing installations. These new colours and their prominent structures, more often than not, appear on their own and rarely in combination with other media. They float on the picture plane emanating a forceful vitality as if attempting to rearrange themselves in a strong magnetic field. They form rows and structures to then again fall out of rhythm and overlap. Additionally, there is a new set of drawings, many of them large-scale, that combine these rather expressive shapes with delicate gestures. The forms sit nearly static on the surface while very thin, filigree traces meander through the planar composition. Lines in colour pencil flow like small rivers and estuaries over opaque or dark rectangles and disperse like spiderwebs on their surfaces tilting the heavy shapes towards a levitating weightlessness.
As always in Müller's oeuvre, the new colours and compositions integrate and communicate with his other drawings, they form alliances and emerge in mixed media works. If placed in groupings or installed in space, the recent motifs inspire an animated and powerful counterweight to the delicate textures and complex formations of other drawings. The outcome is an equilibrium between liberating gestures and measured control, an ambivalence and balancing act that, to different degrees, defines all of Thomas Müller’s drawings.