Berlin-based photographer Andreas Mühe will share his perspective on the world through a new bi-weekly column in the weekend edition of Berliner Zeitung, with each image accompanied by text from his wife, art historian Kristina Schrei. The announcement comes as the provocative photo artist continues to gain international recognition for his staged compositions that challenge German history and social conventions.
The story begins in autumn 1999, above the rooftops of Berlin, where a young man stood on the roof of the Berliner Verlag building with his camera. It was Andreas Mühe, born in 1979 in Karl-Marx-Stadt (now Chemnitz), who had lived in Berlin since age three and experienced the city's legendary free and wild 1990s as a young man adjusting to life. From that autumn day, the view over Berlin's rooftops told a different story: the Palace of the Republic still stood, even though its demolition was already sealed; the Berghain was still called Ostgut; and the NSU terrorist group had already been founded. Ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, everyone looked forward to the promised golden light of the West.
Mühe's carefully conceived and staged photo compositions always reveal a certain kinship with theater, stage, and film, which stems partly from his remarkable family background. His father was the well-known actor Ulrich Mühe, who died early but won an Oscar for his role in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's film "The Lives of Others" (2006). His mother is renowned theater director Annegret Hahn, his brother Konrad is a sculptor, and his half-sister from his father's second marriage is Anna Maria Mühe, a well-known actress.
Familiar with transformation from childhood, Andreas Mühe creates surreal-beautiful, unsettling moments of seduction through his photo stagings with precise lighting direction. He provides compelling arguments for his provocative stagings of "pathos as distance," as he calls it, following Nietzsche's recommendation of the superiority of detachment for philosophers. His works, which he produces exclusively in analog format, often possess an ambivalent, almost somber quality that references the no longer visible but still tangible consequences of history.
Mühe emphasizes that he is neither a reportage photographer nor a portraitist. Instead, he invents fictional yet disturbingly realistic-seeming characters. The art world stared in fascination in 2014 at his Obersalzberg series – provocative, sarcastic, cutting ironic depictions of dark German history. Mühe staged large photographs of men in Nazi uniforms with sharp haircuts against the landscape backdrop of Obersalzberg, Hitler's former mountain retreat.
A year later came the "New Romanticism" series, incorporating typical aspects of this artistic style: loneliness and merging with nature, and viewing landscapes that don't need humans, though humans need nature. Mühe paraphrased Caspar David Friedrich's iconic chalk cliffs motif with a tree on the edge of an abyss between rock formations, letting the late autumn forest mutate into a ghostly woodland. These stagings provoked traditional Caspar David Friedrich admirers as Mühe turned the motifs duplicitously into cold moonlight blue and fiery brown-yellow of the setting sun over Baltic Sea waters, featuring a naked male figure urinating boldly into the panorama – a disrespectful disturbance of harmony and pathos-breaking.
The spectacular National Gallery exhibition "Family Constellation" in 2019 at Hamburg's Hamburger Bahnhof showcased wall-wide family portraits uniting living and deceased members of his extensive, branching family from both maternal and paternal sides. He had deceased family members recreated as startlingly lifelike sculptures based on photo templates. This publicly displayed family image had, besides its psychosocial charge, a memorable aspect: photography between authenticity and construction.
In 2020, Mühe continued his long-term theme of heroes who are actually anti-heroes with the "Biorobots" or "Liquidators" series. Through theatrically staged figures of sacrifice-ready first responders in the disaster area of the Soviet nuclear power plant Chernobyl's Block 4 reactor that exploded on April 26, 1986, in Ukraine, he created a devastating monument staged as dystopian science fiction. He photographed the virtual fusion of human and machine – simultaneously real and unreal.
The men wear gas masks and gloves, like those used during GDR-era civil defense exercises, dressed in overalls, leather vests, and rubber pants – futile attempts to protect themselves from radiation. The supposedly clean nuclear power, the superlative of progress, had lost its innocence. No official victim statistics exist, with 500,000 deaths as a vague assumption.
In 2021, when everyone talked about a Dresden exhibition, Andreas Mühe was called the "Chancellor photographer." As Angela Merkel's term neared its end, he wasn't touring with her but creating fake, staged portraits of the future political retiree. While some photos showed the real Merkel, in a long series Mühe used his mother Annegret Hahn as a convincing double in the old Bonn Chancellor's bungalow.
During Berlin Art Week in autumn 2024, Mühe presented a new series he had begun the previous year: "Germany Pictures." He theatrically yet distantly arranged fictional photo scenes like stage plays with surreal revenants of left and right terrorism in the Federal Republic: the RAF (Red Army Faction) and NSU (National Socialist Underground), groups that terrorized the community in the 1970s and shortly after reunification, overwhelming legislature, executive, and intelligence services.
As always before his color photo stagings, Mühe visited the original locations – the prison cells in Stammheim and the right-wing extremist club in Jena that had been closed since 2012. He then built sets, hired actors, and recreated the cells of three RAF terrorists in Stammheim's high-security wing in an empty Pankow factory hall. He similarly reconstructed the dark basement club in the prefab building where the NSU trio had radicalized before murdering people with migration backgrounds and a young policewoman across the country. The NSU cell wasn't exposed until November 2011, revealing pathetic state failures.
With this series, Mühe didn't want to lump both terrorist groups together but artistically emphasize that both groups, left and right, murdered from ideological conviction, with murderers becoming suicides. In both sets, figures wear death masks as theater or carnival masks. Andreas Mühe deliberately uses the bizarre as a warning, continuing his exploration of German history through the lens of staged photography that forces viewers to confront uncomfortable truths about their past.
