MUSEUM TO SCALE 1/7

Sofie Muller completed the course in Painting at the Royal Academy in Antwerp and then Free Graphics and Sculpture at Sint-Lucas in Ghent, where she also taught for years. Besides graphic work, she makes sculptures and installations in which she thematizes the vulnerability inherent in the human condition in a simple and subdued, but at the same time penetrating way. For her mental portraits, Muller initially worked a lot in bronze and patinated body parts or entire figures - often children - to give them a more lived-in look. Smoke, soot and blood intensified the suffering by which they were scarred. More recent sculptures in alabaster are more pared down and testify to Muller's curiosity about new techniques and thorough craftsmanship. One example is Alabaster Mentalis, which was given a place in the chapel of the former convent of the Countesses on the City Campus. Even when she is guided more by battered material, everything revolves around the traces of complex and sometimes life-defining periods full of inner injuries and conflicting feelings: resistance and resignation, despair and conviction. Muller thus raises questions of identity, gender and physicality, where the constant manipulative influence of the outside world on both body and mind is omnipresent.