The universe of Wolfgang Müller

People with less interest in music or art may not recognize the name, but that doesn’t make Wolfgang Müller any less of a legend.

Born 67 years ago in Wolfsburg and a longtime resident of Berlin, Wolfgang Müller is a musician, artist, publicist, bestselling author (Subkultur Westberlin 1979–1989 is now in its fifth edition!), actor, radio playwright, Genialer Dilletant (literally: ingenious dilettante), curator, graphic artist, performer, guest professor, elf, and expert on Iceland. But above all, he is the spiritus rector of the legendary band Die Tödliche Doris.

The grand master of pop theory, Diedrich Diederichsen, once described Müller as a "reverse conceptualist"; the author Marcel Beyer called him a "misunderstanding scientist" in his 2009 laudatory speech (Müller received the Karl Sczuka Prize for his radio play Séance Vocibus Avium, in which he reconstructed the songs of eleven extinct bird species based on scientific records).

For us, he is simply a really great artist and a really nice person, whom we met last week at the Escher Konschthal, where an exhibition is currently taking place until 22 June, showing key works from all of Müller's creative phases. This is the first major exhibition of the artist's work outside Germany.

Wolfgang Müller takes all the time in the world to guide us through the exhibition, telling us a story about every detail, no matter how small, which in turn leads him to other stories. He talks and talks and talks, and after all the years he has been making art, he is still so enthusiastic that even we, who normally occupy a top position on the open-ended scale of enthusiasm, are almost speechless.