Ob Color painters or steel sculptors, no artist likes such pigeonholes, would describe themselves as “representatives” of this or that style. In the beginning, Mischa Kuball once remarked, he accepted the category of light artist without complaint, but that was naïve, because this attribution reduces his works to their external appearance. The template has stuck with the artist ever since he performed a series of interventions in public space that have become etched into regional memory. In fact, he prefers to work with electric light in his best works, this is his artistic material – and was he awarded which prize in 2016? With the German Light Art Prize.
His early works are left to be remembered all the more emphatically as they were temporary interventions that did not leave behind a physical work, but rather documentary photos of the interventions and installations with the ephemeral material. Kuball, born in Düsseldorf in 1957, had demonstratively strengthened in his oeuvre what seems suspect in contemporary art: the aura, the radiance of art, a fascination that the Düsseldorf band Kraftwerk once conjured up in their song “Neonlicht”. However, Kuball did not and does not let the light “shimmer” like the human machine in her song lyrics, above all he is far from any flirt with nostalgia.
Out of this world: Mischa Kuball’s “Public preposition/parc stage” in the Morsbroich Museum in Leverkusen, 2021.
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Image: Mischa Kuball Archives, Düsseldorf
In 1990, Kuball used the storey light in a cool and minimalist way in his “Megazeichen”, the colossal piece by the young artist, who chose an incunabula of West German architecture as the setting: the Mannesmann high-rise in the old town with its twenty-three floors, built by Paul Schneider- Esleben directly on the Rhine. When night fell, the corridor lights stayed on on selected floors, transforming the administration building into a gigantic urban sculpture. It changed its structure for six weeks in a seven-day rhythm and not only demonstrated in a powerful way that the object art of the sixties could surprisingly be continued; She also revealed that in towering offices other income than just economic ones can be achieved – art in architecture in the best sense, in this case an opus magnum.
The birth of the disco ball from space fever: Mischa Kuball’s “Five planets”, 2015.
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Image: Mischa Kuball Archives, Düsseldorf
Kuball followed up with other impressive works related to the location and context, such as in the former synagogue in Stommeln near Cologne. In 1996, he equipped the interior of the former prayer house with spotlights that radiated emphatically and brilliantly outwards. He celebrated the small, set-back building with a pathos that seemed appropriate here; At the same time, he fearlessly recalled the light production by Albert Speer from the “Third Reich” and even the pogroms of 1938, which the Stommeln synagogue only escaped by chance. In 2012, Kuball provided the University of Wuppertal with its many concrete buildings with white light bands and, viewed from a distance, transformed it into a modern acropolis. In Katowice in 2013 he sent a tram that was brightly lit from the inside with blind windows and no passengers as a “Ghosttram” on a nocturnal journey.
Such works do not need a political message, they have an effect of their own accord and are an appeal for aesthetic autonomy in public. On the other hand, the banner that Kuball is hanging up in the stairwell in his current exhibition “Reference Rooms” in the Museum Morsbroich in Leverkusen makes an effort: “Critical thinking needs time and space, here and everywhere”. That should go without saying, especially in a contemporary art exhibition. Which in this case is not so critical. He sees the show as a “small journey through thirty years of my work”, a show in the diminutive, so to speak. It looks good in the historic, intimate castle rooms (better than the sober rooms of the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, where it was first shown), and there’s quite a bit to see: rotating colored plexiglass panes reflecting off the walls; Video views of urban scenes in kaleidoscopic refraction; moving images from a techno club, projected onto reflective foil, which liquify the space and ignite a thunderstorm of colours; or disco balls that circulate their reflections and with them a stream of letters in space.
All of these works are combined in titles and themes with great intellectual history and scientific material – the Platonic allegory of the cave, observations by Galileo Galilei, the names of five planets, which are projected onto mirror balls using templates. These works certainly do not fail to have an effect; but they are underpinned with references from antiquity to the view of the universe, which Kuball’s external projects do not need. These, in turn, can only be called up as documentation. The fate of an artist who knows how to play to his strengths outdoors.
Messengers of the stars on Leverkusen earth: Mischa Kuball’s “Five suns/after Galileo”, 2018.
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Image: Mischa Kuball Archives, Düsseldorf
Or works in larger dimensions in the White Cube, as recently in the private Draiflessen Collection in Mettingen, Westphalia. Kuball had set up a spacious installation that is well worth seeing, dealing with Emil Nolde’s legacy. With superimposed color filters, Kuball approached those Nolde originals that had been exhibited at the first three editions of the Documenta, this time letting them appear in an extremely strange light in order to maintain a distance from the images with such refraction. Because of the pandemic, the exhibition took place practically behind closed doors and will be relaunched next winter in Kassel’s Fridericianum – the rare case that an artist uses his own resources to put up a colleague’s neuralgic oeuvre for discussion.
Mischa Kuball – Referenzräume. At the Morsbroich Museum, Leverkusen, until April 24. The catalog costs 38 euros.