Biography Martina Angela Müller

 

Known for her luminous color abstractions and dynamically moving sculptures in bronze, steel and porcelain, Müller’s artistic practice is rooted in meditation that guides the unfolding creative process of fluid, elemental and atmospheric color interactions towards form and meaning. Visionary experiences, heightened sense acuity and a deep inner listening are the hallmarks of her process. The resulting radiant paintings often structured by scripts of nature, music or movement of soul endeavor to awaken a resonance in the viewer of the deeper spiritual substrates of what it means to be human rooted in earth existence today. Her unwavering pursuit of the spiritual in art since her earliest days as an artist are based on contemplations of sacred texts and mythologies from around the world, Rudolf Steiner’s verses and meditations and Buddha’s contemplative practice.

Martina Angela Müller was born in 1962 in Korbach, Germany. She began painting at a very early age and studied at Ruhruniversität Bochum, Germany, Ermerson College, England and Empire State University, NY. Since 1996 she lives and works in Ghent, NY. Her work has been shown at numerous venues in the Northeast, most notably alongside Hilma af Klint at Lightforms Art Center in 2020 in Hudson, NY. A recent solo exhibition in 2024 at Lightforms Art Center showcased a retrospective of work from 2010 to the present as well as large scale meditative painting investigations into the activities of angelic beings. Her sculptural work has been shown at SculptureNow at the Mount in Lennox, MA in 2017 and 2022. Her work was also presented in a group show at LaMama LaGalleria in NYC in 2014.

Public collections include the Ashuelot River Park in Keene, NH as well as the Hawthorne Valley Association in Ghent, NY. Art in public spaces is an integral part of her artistic missions as it adds a tremendous value to the places where people gather, live, work and meet each other. Her sculptures have been featured in public places at Meredith Sculpture Walk, Flying Horse Sculpture Show, Topsfield Library and Camphill Spaces for Adults with special needs. She has participated in numerous juried exhibitions and won prizes and awards through the New England Sculptors Association and others.

Müller is on the faculty of the Alkion Center and works as freelance artist and teacher in Ghent NY where she maintains her studio. 

 Artist Statement

 

Martina Angela Müller is a multidisciplinary artist working in atmospheric abstract color painting, sculpture and colored light installation that weave together sculptural and painterly elements. Born (1962) and raised in Germany she started painting and sculpting at a young age and after reading Kandinsky’s About the Spiritual in Art as a seventeen-year-old, has drawn extensively on the power of meditation and the spiritual throughout the duration of her artistic career. Visionary inner experiences that actively form themselves in the realm of imagination in front of the inner eye often manifest themselves in her sculptures, paintings or installation. Work in the studio is always preceded by meditation that lifts the artistic process out of the ordinary towards overarching ideas of enduring universal values that could resonate with others. Her luminous paintings are created with oils, fluid acrylics, and often superimposed on a substrate of earth, sand and ash after immersion in living processes of water and wind out in nature. Her porcelain sculpture maquettes are frequently based on gnarled pieces of wood, magnifying their character and fluidity of movement, listening to the living forces in nature and eventually releasing the artistic process into the evolving spirit of the piece. Her artworks pursue the spiritual in art.

 

As an abstract artist Müller has drawn extensively on studies of Anthroposophy, Theosophy and Buddhism and through meditations worked towards heightened inner movement that finds its way into the compositional elements as a spiritual script. Both sculptures and paintings are an expression for the search of the truth that lives in the divine and a hope to communicate those inner movements to others, like a landscape painter would strive to convey the particular essence and mood of a landscape to their viewers. The interaction of light and dark through gradations, transitions, sparkling mark making and lacy overlays is an essential part of the process to bring out the ephemeral, immaterial nature of the divine in its atmospheric interactions with the physical, making the resulting artworks conducive to meditation and contemplation hoping to meet a resonance in the beholder. Due to the immaterial content of the work, the chosen fluidity of color cascades in spills and runs, in rivulets and pools across the canvas, spontaneously coming ashore in solid color locations and gritty peninsulas that are gently guided gifts out of the process. Alternately the color gets formed into lacy, shimmering veils leading the viewer through multiple planes into the interior of the painting and an environment of quiet reflection. Working with the canvas upright allows for very conscious forming and shaping with all senses at high alert, while working flat on low level supports and tilting the canvas in many directions facilitates an all-immersive fluid style of working with splatters and large flows of color. The resulting many-layered canvases allow depth of color and transcendence of light to emerge over the course of weeks and months.

Similar principles are at work in the creation of the porcelain sculpture maquettes that are cast into bronze later. Fluidity of movement is achieved as planes form themselves into their ultimate shape out of the dialogue of convexity and concavity, continuous turning, the pulling out of thin and thinnest layers of clay from a center into winglike formations serve the meditative content that is being expressed.

Additionally, deep immersion in the elemental processes of nature occurs by submerging canvases in water, sand, earth and ash processes to include the wisdom of the elements at work. Studying and drawing inscriptions of the ethereal forces of nature in wood and clouds lead to compositional inspirations for sculpture. Forces of nature made visible through art can resonate subconsciously and powerfully with the viewer through being active within every person and therefore relatable. The art invites the beholder into inner spaces of origin, reflection and one’s own interior core.

Development and Collections

After extensive studies of landscape, the figurative and portraiture in the very early days of her career, she soon settled on color and form abstraction as the appropriate style for her ongoing exploration of the spiritual in art. A new level of expression and style was achieved through the introduction of oil paint into her work when she became an apprentice to Hudson River School painter Thomas Locker in 2002, where classical oil painting techniques were studied in depth and a whole new skill set achieved that was then translated into her signature contemporary atmospheric color abstraction style.

Drawing on her gift of synesthesia, Müller has painted and sculpted numerous works inspired by music. In 2013 the Stravinsky Rite of Spring Series consisting of sketches and eight paintings honored the 100-year anniversary of the inaugural performance of the Rite of Spring. In 2019 the Beethoven Cello Sonata Series was created in collaboration with two music professors at Williams College. In the concert, a video projection of the painting process expressing the colors and movements of the music, the inner essence and mood of the sonata in flowing, translucent paint accompanied the performance and the four finished paintings, one for each movement, were on display.

The Seven Elohim Series in 2016 explored the activities of the Elohim, great Angels of Form, in elemental processes of nature. The most recent series Sacred Beginnings from 2024 consists of nine large-scale painting meditations in oil on the creative forces of the Nine Angelic Hierarchies in world- and human evolution.

Since 2020 Müller’s sculptures in bronze, steel and aluminum have been acquired by private collectors as well as institutions and public parks for their collections throughout the Northeast. Art in public spaces adds a tremendous value to the places where people gather, live, work and meet each other. Public art contributes to the identity of the location and signals that the creators of the space consider art as an essential component that lifts the spirit and adds an unspoken value to the setting where it gets placed.  


 Testimonial:


 “Ms. Muller has been a well documented member of the fine arts community for many years and her artworks in all media are at a high technical, high creative and aesthetically advanced level. Her artworks exquisitely convey the full range of human emotion, her textural qualities are stunning. In some works her lines and shapes are wonderfully organic. In others, they are reminiscent of landscape. Still other works appear to reference physical cosmology. Her handling of figurative art is also of a high creative level, her interpretations of the human condition are fully informed while most creative. In all works her color theory has been pushed to the limit of human perception, as she renders fantastic and amazingly beautiful ranges of and combinations of color. Her works are of the highest caliber. To say that her work is highly creative is understating the impact that each of them carries to the viewer. Her artworks are each non-verbal communications that can be viewed over a great deal of time without one tiring of the sight, but, in fact, the viewer continues to perceive new things in each art work”.

Christine Hunt, PhD, Empire State University

Curation:

  • Senior Artistic Director at Lightforms Art Center from May 2019 to January 2022. Curated a show of work by Hilma af Klint from spring throughout summer of 2020. Showed internationally acclaimed artists Judy Pfaff, Richard Erdman, Jason Middlebrook and Daniel Mullen, as well as mid career and local artists. Spiritually inspired art was the main focus of the curation.

Hilma af Klint, Tree of Knowledge Series, on loan from Albert Steffen Foundation, at Lightforms, Hudson, 2020

Public Sculpture:

  • Lift, at Ashuelot River Park, Keene, NH, supported by a grant from Arts Alive! summer 2021

  • Flight, at Hawthorne Valley Association, Ghent, NY, fall 2020

Exhibitions:

  • Public Art at Topsfield Library in Topsfield, MA. December 2024-December 2025

  • Flying Horse Sculpture Show, Hamilton, MA, September through November 2024

  • Solo Exhibition Retrospective and Sacred Beginnings at Lightforms Art Center in Hudson, NY July-August 2024

  • The Equinox-the Balance of Light, Juried online show at New England Sculptors Association, spring 2023

  • SculptureNow, at the Mount, Lenox, MA, summer 2022

  • The Equinox-Balance, Juried online show at New England Sculptors Association, spring 2022, 2nd Prize Winner

  • Worlds of Color, Lightforms Art Center, Hudson, NY, summer 2021

  • The Equinox, Juried online show at New England Sculptors Association, spring 2021

  • Moving Forms/Dynamic Balance, Sculpture Show at Lightforms Art Center, Hudson, NY, spring 2021

  • Imagination in the Time of Pandemic, Lightforms Art Center, Hudson, NY, winter 2021

  • The Infinite and the Divine, Hilma af Klint and female artists at Lightforms Art Center, Hudson, NY 2020

  • Metamorphosis and the Living Forces in Nature, Lightforms Art Center, Hudson, NY 2019-2020

  • Beethoven Project, at Williams College with Ronald Feldman and Doris Stevenson, MA 2019

  • Changing Landscape, New England Sculptors Association, Eustis Estate, Milton, MA 2019

  • Seeing Red, at Meetinghouse Gallery, New Marlborough, MA, July 2019

  • Flying Horse Sculpture Show, Hamilton, MA Summer 2018

  • SculptureNow, at the Mount, Lenox, MA, Summer 2017

  • Out of Many, One, at Meetinghouse Gallery, New Marlborough, MA, August 2017

  • Entry Point, at Center Point Gallery, NYC, Spring 2017

  • Chatham Meadows Sculpture Show, Chatham, NY, 2016

  • Group Show at Diana Felber Gallery, West Stockbridge, MA, Fall 2016

  • Group Show at LaMama LaGalleria, New York City, 2014

  • Participating Artist at “Art in Giving”, Boston, MA , 2014-present

  • Solo show at Joan Allen Gallery, Ghent, NY, 2015

  • Two artist show with installation at Free Columbia Space, Philmont, NY, 2013

  • Solo show at Fountain Hall Performing Art Center, Copake, NY, 2012

  • Installation and paintings for Arts Walk at Basilica Industria, Hudson, NY, 2010

  • Group Show at Threefold Auditorium, Spring Valley, NY 2010

  • Continuous showings at Cooperative Gallery 345 in Hudson, NY, 2007-2009

  • Sanford Smith Gallery, Great Barrington, MA 2000

Prizes:

  • Second Prize, Juried Online Show, New England Sculptor’s Association, Spring 2022

  • Honorable Mention, Empire State University Student Competition, 2019

  • Honorable Mention, Chatham Meadows Sculpture Show 2016

  • Honorable Mention, Book Cover Competition, Publisher Freies Geistesleben, Germany, 1987

Grants:

  • Arts Alive! Grant for public sculpture in Keene, NH 2020

  • Credere Grant for Installation at Basilica Industria, Hudson, NY 2010

  • Ilse Kolbuszowski grant for exhibit and installation at Free Columbia Space, 2013

Teaching:     

  • Teaching art to adults since 1990

  • Teaching art at the middle and high school level since 1997

  • Currently teaching at the Alkion Center for Adult Education at Hawthorne Valley, Ghent,


Illustration and Book Covers and Graphic Work:

  • Internationally published children’s book illustrator (Floris Books, Christofoor, Urachhaus, etc.) of three children’s books, 1997-1999

  • Numerous book covers, logos and illustrations for magazines and periodicals

  • Cover of the Cortland Review, 2008

Press:

  • By the Way Berkshires, July 2022

  • Berkshire Edge October 2020

  • Article about Muller’s work in “Lilipoh” magazine Fall Issue 2013

  • Several articles about Müller’s work in Newsletter of Visual Art Section 2013-present

 

Education:              

  • Cambridge University, England, English Proficiency Exam

  • Ruhr University, Bochum, Art and English

  • Emerson College, England, Art and English

  • Institute for Waldorf Pedagogy, Witten, Germany, High School Art Education

  • Empire State University, NY, Art