The oeuvre of Sofie Muller (Sint-Niklaas, Belgium) portrays La Condition Humaine in a wayward way. This results in an impressive and varied repertoire in which man excels in all his vulnerability. With installations and sculptures, supplemented with works on paper, she visualizes our deepest and darkest psyche. Her urge for perfection and craftsmanship reconciles with the sometimes brutal visualization of inner injuries, which reinforces her message and leads to a mental portrait of us, human beings.

Muller’s sculptures of hands feel emblematic – foundational. When we claim to know something intimately, we often say we know it like the back of our hand. The terrain formed by veins and knuckles, by skin and nails is unquestionably the part of the body that we sight most often. It may be that we recognize this topography more than we do our own faces, whose coordinates after all, can only be found reversed in a mirror. Hands are laden with symbolism and responsibility. From depictions of stigmata to Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel’s ‘hand of god’, art history is loaded with images of hands – in prayer, at work, cradling, directing, striking, placating, beseeching, nailed to a cross. Thomas, overcome with doubt reaches out his hand to touch Christ’s wound and as Dave Hickey pointed out so potently in his The Invisible Dragon, Mapplethorpe’s infamous fisting image is as much about the disappearance of the hand as it is its new location. The sheer horror of the idea that under some religious regimes, hands may be cut off for theft, demonstrates the most repellent punishment of not merely body but of soul.

Sofie Muller’s hands then, illicit the most visceral awareness in us. No part of the body so completely informs our understanding of touch, of feel – expresses the utter necessity of contact. The manner in which Muller’s forms remain partially imprisoned by the alabaster reminds one of Medardo Rosso whose heads are forever captive of the larger mass of material. This communion between the form and its original material DNA seems to suggest that our mineral life is always at hand. We may escape it – but only for a time. If animation is only temporary then we need to find a way to wrestle less with its inevitability, be somehow accepting of this fugitive state and deal more with the quality of our existence.

Excerpt from catalogue essay, Andrew Jensen, 2021