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hOw it all began...
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Friday afternoon. The calm in my studio in the former fire station at De Ruijterkade is rudely interrupted by a terrible noise that is impossible to ignore...
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Dammit!
PJ O T R M Ü L L E R B O O K F O R M O
I hate this. I hate being disturbed as I’m working. That you don’t know who’s at the other end of the line. It makes me paranoid.
Usually I don‘t bother answering, but this time I decide to pick up.
It’s the supplier of a stone that was meant to be delivered from Italy on Wednesday...
Si?
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Signore Müller, I’m very sorry, but the chauffeur has been called away for family reasons. He can’t deliver the stone until next month. But we can provide you with a different stone…
What do you mean, a different stone? I chose this one specially! Have you gone crazy or something?
But signore Müller, you don’t under…
I don’t have time for this nonsense! That stone has to be here by Wednesday, otherwise I’m not paying!
Well, you know what, you can stick that stone of yours!
Jesus, I can’t carry on working like this!
Dammit, it’s o’clock already!
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PJ O T R M Ü L L E R B O O K F O R M O
Here we go, just when you want to get a pie in the oven…
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Come along, we’re about to set out on the journey.
Is there nothing better to do? Journey?
You just watch out and let yourself down carefully, it can be slippy and rough here at the opening of the cave. I’ve told you about my life, and now I’m going to tell you the story of my sculptures.
Shucks! Mo has left his mobile phone at home. And he’s lost without that thing…
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So, here we are. Behind this door begins my life as a sculptor.
You mean that weird art of yours, Dad?
Haha!
Aha, you just laugh about it. Oh well, it’s my very first work. It’s true that it wasn’t much good.
“This is my first…
PJ O T R M Ü L L E R B O O K F O R M O
…at the Rietveld Academy. I personally thought they were all really erotic shapes, but that’s a joke! Grafted onto Brancusi. It was a learning process and I was still terribly impressionable.”
…professional work.
25 Work for my finals…
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When you work with abstract forms you always have that dilemma: When exactly is something abstract? Can figurative be abstract too?
Come along, let’s push on. Forward in time, a level higher. Literally and figuratively.
What is he jabbering on about again?!
I was preoccupied with that question for a long time. When the idea is more abstract than the form, I find sculpting as an art form is too concrete. Music, for example, is much more abstract. Can you follow me a little?
Well anyway. In the first year after the Rietveld Academy I started to investigate what stone actually means to me. For example, why can’t monolithic stone look as if it’s bending over your leg?
Oh, this is the department of the sins of my youth! See how well I can sculpt!’
All these sculptures are dedicated to girlfriends. Ah well, I was still young. In the eyes of some young women the artistic calling is oh so romantic.
That big grey sculpture on the left is dedicated to Charlotte. It’s a classic contrapposto, a supporting leg / relaxed leg pose, which I tried to execute in an abstract way.
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Oh yes, that’s true as well. I dedicated this sculpture to Els. Until this sculpture I was beset by problems with stress and migraine, because I’d gone against the wishes of my parents. Then luckily – I was twenty-five or -six – it was immediately acquired by the City of Amsterdam for the huge sum of 30.000 guilders and installed at the Koningsplein, on the bridge opposite the University Library. For my parents it was proof I had made a good choice after all. Back then people actually thought it was a fairly sexually tinted sculpture.
You bet! It looks like two packs of chewing gum having a boink! PJ O T R M Ü L L E R B O O K F O R M O
Upwards, to the next room. This sculpture was made for a commission from the City of Amsterdam for the Bijlmermeer, where it still stands. Back then it was a new city district and I thought that I should be able to create something totally abstract.
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Pfft… you and your abstract art…
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“At that time I was still wrestling with the material. This sinusoidal shape is hewn from a single piece of stone – I was young and wanted to prove what a virtuoso I was with a hammer and chisel.”
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“The sculpture was eventually installed in the Bijlmermeer. A critic commented: ‘He treats marble like putty.’ That was a painful but instructive moment.”
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…though a deadline always helps as well.
“The City of Eindhoven asked me to erect a structure on a small island. It’s actually a bowl with a festoon of oversize fruit that is protected by a roof. Sometimes a commission like that comes in at just the right moment to drag you out of a deadlock.”
All that fruit reminds me I still have to go and do some grocery shopping later.
The next commission was a special case.
The prison next to the Pieter Baan Centre wanted a sculpture for the courtyard. I visited the prison, and first I had to go through the Pieter Baan Centre, where seriously disturbed murderers are held. You pass them on the stairs, and you just sense that there’s something wrong. You have to watch your step, and that is what they exude. You’re accompanied by two guards, you go through one of those security ports, your documents are checked. In that other prison, where the ‘normal’ criminals are held, I got visits from prisoners who also painted. They showed me paintings of little birds behind bars. Fantastic!
For me this was the world on its head. So for that courtyard I made a pillar, a large and heavy thing measuring 4 by 4 metres and 3 metres high, and I turned that on its head.
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What did you think? Is there more?
Come along, let’s move on. Just follow me.
Cool! A fort!
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Hey, there’s Mum!
This is ‘To Noumenon’, also from 1987. Rudi Oxenaar, then director of the KröllerMüller Museum, was present at the opening of the exhibition route. He asked me to create something like this for the sculpture garden for the museum’s 50th anniversary. ‘To Noumenon’ was 16 metres high, so big that when you walked past it you initially didn’t spot it. But the greater the discovery the better. At the top I placed four statues, portraits of the people from the technical department. Then I could be sure that they would guard the sculpture properly.
PJ O T R M Ü L L E R B O O K F O R M O
Hello there!
I made this sculpture, ‘Cathedral’, in 1987. I was invited to contribute to an art route through Groningen, Friesland and Drenthe with work by international artists. The work is about 12 by 8 metres and 10 metres tall. It has two sections: the front part stands separate from the rear, so from the side you can look through the middle. It’s a sequel to ‘My Paradise’: visitors can walk into it and become part of it. I wanted it to be part of the surroundings, so I copied the little spire on top from a nearby church.
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The living-room temple on the right was inspired by Indian temples, but it became increasingly sculptural. Hardly surprising for a sculptor, funnily enough!
On top there are two niches containing retorts with an early Christian text, a palindrome of five words. You used to find these on doors, a sign for Christians that other Christians lived in the house.
I made good use of all those monastery vacations in my sculptures!
The white piece above was part of a sculpture symposium in Italy. I had to make a sculpture in front of an audience in Fanano’s car park. Well, that’s something I’ll never do again. I got so annoyed that I decided to create a little Lady Chapel, in a village that was already filled with little Lady Chapels. When I explained what my work meant, it didn’t go down too well. For them it verged on blasphemy.
These small terracotta works are like precursors to the large works for the European Ceramic Work Centre.
The European Ceramic Work Centre, or EKWC, had a new base in Den Bosch, and for the opening they invited a group of international artists, some of whom had previously worked in clay. I hadn’t at any rate. As a sculptor I think clay is a strange substance: it’s soft, you do something with it, and it stays soft, unless you go and fire it. Well anyway, I was there now and I was allowed to work with an unlimited quantity of clay. Then I made this, a work that is 5 metres across and 1.50 metres high. Well, I didn’t make it all myself… my Norwegian assistant Frank threw the separate components in clay. It did take a whole loaf of bread every hour to fill the Norwegian’s stomach, otherwise he wouldn’t have had the strength to produce those 1.50-metre-high objects on his potter’s wheel.
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Those things look wobbly…
MO! No!
Just joking!
You scared me to death, lad!
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