Martin Wühler

Works

Umnachtung

Wundmal: Atavismen

Der Sand
aus den Urnen

White Fragility
(black fatigue)
Astroturfing

Tenax Vitæ: Epitaphe

Tenax Vitæ. The phrase clings, Latin for “tenacious of life,” or more viscerally, “clinging to life.” It summons the dramatic sculpture by Rinaldo Carnielo (c. 1893), in which a desperate young man grapples with skeletal Death itself, fingers locked around the bony leg of the reaper as if sheer mortal stubbornness might forestall the inevitable. The title carries that same tensile energy into Wühler’s work: a fierce, almost animal refusal of oblivion, enacted not through heroic bronze but through the slow, erosive patience of stone and memory.

Epitaphe. Here the classical restraint of the funerary marker meets the blunt finality of the German Epitaph. These are not grandiloquent inscriptions meant to console the living but silent, weathered slabs—markers stripped of names, dates, and comforting pieties. They stand as mute witnesses to lives that have already slipped into the anonymous earth, their surfaces colonized by time rather than carved by human intent.

The work itself consists of six heavy stone slabs—dense Taina Grey porcelain stoneware outdoor tiles—arrayed in a solemn horizontal row, hung at equal intervals on the wall with heavy-duty hooks. Each bears a digital collage built from 3D scans of Wilhelmine-era funerary sculptures from Leipzig and Dresden cemeteries. These once-sentimental figures—angels, Christs, mourning women—appear in states of severe erosion: a headless Jesus, a female form shorn of arms and cranium. Wühler overlays them with images drawn from his own family archive, then transfers the composite onto the stone via the gum bichromate process, a demanding 19th-century “noble print” technique. The result is monochrome, deep black, the original photographs and scans barely legible. What remains feels less like photography than like the slow encroachment of moss or lichen across a grave marker—organic, atmospheric, mournful. These are gravestones of unknown people, inscriptions long since effaced.

Part of the exhibition binary in-situ at Fahrenheit Space Berlin in 2021, the installation arrived at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Omicron hysteria gripped the country; exclusion of the unvaccinated reached its cruel zenith. In that atmosphere of collective dread and enforced separation, Wühler’s slabs resonated with particular force—physical objects that insisted on presence while embodying absence, endurance while courting decay.

In the same room hangs The Sand from the Urns, a triptych on aluminum Dibond. The title directly invokes Paul Celan’s early collection Der Sand aus den Urnen (1948), and especially its title poem, with its mold-green house of oblivion, its beheaded minstrel drumming on moss and bitter pubic hair, its festering toe tracing lost features in the sand. Celan’s verses are saturated with the Holocaust’s ash and memory; Wühler’s slabs echo that same haunted materiality. Both works grapple with what remains after catastrophe—sand in urns, eroded stone, images that dissolve into their own surfaces. The connection is not illustrative but atmospheric: a shared poetics of the remnant, where language and likeness alike fray into something older and more elemental.

Opposite these works one encounters Synthetic media – or an object that never existed and the wall-filling mirror Staying Together at a Distance, fabricated from Mystic Mirror film stretched over an aluminum frame. The mirror reflects the viewer back into the room, fracturing the solemn procession of slabs into infinite, ghostly repetitions while underscoring the pandemic’s cruel paradox: proximity without contact, community at a remove. Wühler’s Epitaphe thus sits in a charged constellation—eroded memory facing synthetic unreality, stone facing mirror, the tenacious grip on life confronting its own spectral multiplication.

In the end, these six black slabs do what the best funerary art has always done: they make mortality palpable without offering false comfort. They are heavy, obdurate, and strangely beautiful, like grief itself when it has settled into its final, enduring form. One leaves the room quieter, carrying a little more of the stone’s weight.


synthetic media
or an object that never existed

In the compact white cube of Studio 45 cbm at Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Martin Wühler erected a modest yet quietly devastating monument to the slippage between what is and what might be. Titled Synthetic Media or an Object That Never Existed, the installation feels at once like a grave, a reliquary, a child’s sandbox after the flood, and a half-remembered dream. A low mountain of bark mulch, dyed an absolute, funereal white, rises from the floor. Scattered across and partly buried in it are objects—some found, some printed, all surrendered to the same chalky pallor—that refuse to declare their ontological status.


Wühler, born in Erfurt in 1983, has always been a wry interrogator of the digital uncanny. Here he goes further. The exhibition flyer announces, with deadpan glee: “This person does not exist: Martin Wühler.” The rest of the text is little more than a constellation of borrowed digital terminology. The joke lands like a Zen koan delivered by a neural network. Who, exactly, is presenting what to whom?


The physical presence of the work is seductive and slightly repulsive in the best sense. The white mulch has the texture of desiccated bone meal or fresh snow that has already begun to melt. Upon it rest devotional fragments: personal mementos gifted by friends, now stripped of their original color and context, alongside 3D-printed sculptures—an athlete, the head of a noble lady, a Narcissus—whose telltale support structures still cling to them like skeletal scaffolding. These plastic ghosts carry the visible archaeology of their own making. One empty vitrine on a plinth is labeled, according to the accompanying schematic map, “Deep Fake.” The map itself, hung nearby, pairs each object with an internet-derived term that bears no obvious relation to its form, cheerfully severing any last claim to stable meaning.


The ensemble reads as a kind of post-apocalyptic Wunderkammer, or, as curator Hendrik Bündge memorably put it, a “graveyard of devotional objects.” A thirty-kilogram river stone hauled by Bündge himself from the Oos, the stream that runs through Baden-Baden, anchors the scene like a stubborn piece of old reality refusing to dissolve. Everything else feels provisional, borrowed, or algorithmically hallucinated. Wühler has described the piece as a humorous dissection of the components of an artificial intelligence—input, training data, rendering, projection, absence—yet the humor is melancholic, almost tender.


The installation was conceived in a dream and realized in the anxious early weeks before the first German lockdown in 2020, when the physical world itself began to feel synthetic and the screen became the primary site of social and aesthetic encounter. That timing is not incidental. The work’s whiteout aesthetic and its deliberate blurring of the real and the fabricated speak precisely to that moment when the boundary between lived experience and mediated simulation grew porous and then nearly invisible.


Later, when the installation traveled to Fahrenheit Space in Berlin, Wühler broke the fourth wall. Viewers were invited behind the mountain; the illusion of the mound was deconstructed, its humble plywood armature and piled mulch exposed. The gesture was characteristic: just when you begin to luxuriate in the poetic fiction, the artist reminds you that even the fiction is constructed, and that the construction, too, is worth looking at.
In Synthetic Media or an Object That Never Existed, Martin Wühler does not merely comment on the age of deepfakes, generative imagery, and virtual selves. He builds a small, fragile altar to their existential consequences. The work is funny, elegiac, and strangely moving. Standing before it, one feels the gentle vertigo of a culture that has begun to outsource not only its images but its sense of what counts as real. Wühler’s mountain is not large, yet it casts a long shadow. One leaves wondering, not without a smile, whether any of us still exist in quite the way we used to.

Hot Options

Martin Wühler’s three pigment prints, Mercurius, Venus, and Mars, greet the viewer at W139 like emissaries from a world in which the gods have gone digital and returned wearing new skins. Mounted on Alu-Dibond and held in crisp shadow-gap steel frames, they hover with the cool authority of contemporary tech objects while radiating an almost feverish chromatic heat. The exhibition Sublime Eroding (2015) provided the perfect stage: a raw artist-run space tucked into Amsterdam’s historic center, steps from the Beurs van Berlage, that former temple of trade where capital once moved with mercantile swagger. Here, commerce and contemplation have long shared uneasy quarters. Wühler’s works feel right at home—hot options in every sense.

Each piece begins with classical sculpture—Mercurius, Venus, Mars—those enduring avatars of speed, desire, and strife. Wühler folds them into dense digital collages inside a 3D environment, layering scans and models drawn from his archive and beyond: a worker bee in autumnal fall for Mercurius (glowing in saturated red), the ghostly three-dimensional supernova for Venus (a delicate haze of light pink, blue, and dominant white), and, for Mars, a Nigerian war figurine entangled with iridescent soap bubbles amid riotous color. The resulting pigment prints are hybrids in the truest sense. One part cannot be conceived without the other: the digital origin is unmistakable, yet it fuses inseparably with the analogue weight of the print, the industrial sheen of the aluminum, and the architectural presence of the steel frame. As Wühler notes, “the obviously digital origin of the image content merges with the analogue materiality of the image carrier, its steel frame and the space surrounding it.”

These works continue Wühler’s investigation of 3D printing and its afterlives. Where earlier pieces manifested directly as printed objects, Hot Options translates the same logic into two-dimensional hybrids. Set pieces from art history, science, and personal archives—digitized dust, 1950s photographs of marabous and walruses, wax pours, scanning electron micrographs of viruses and crystals—are recombined and then materialized. The process itself enacts the artist’s core insight: “Digital production and distribution technologies have become the basis of artistic and cultural practice… It is in the blending of analogue and digital manifestations that the truly hybrid objects emerge.”

The title Hot Options, borrowed from Claude Lévi-Strauss, points to societies (or conditions) gripped by rapid transformation—social inequality, armed conflict, intensifying networks, technical acceleration. In such “hot” states, history accelerates and everything is in play. Placing these works near Amsterdam’s old stock exchange sharpens the resonance. Finance is the ultimate hot option machine: abstract value circulating at blinding speed, remixing the world’s materials and meanings. Wühler’s layered image-memories mirror this ceaseless recombination. They draw from “the collective image memory of the constantly moving digital archive,” lifting fragments out of circulation and granting them fresh, sometimes uneasy potential.

Yet the exhibition’s theme, Sublime Eroding, adds a deeper melancholy. The classical sublime—vast, awe-inspiring, often terrifying—once offered Western culture a glimpse of transcendence. After the Enlightenment, that sublime began to erode under the pressures of reason, industry, and later the digital flood. Wühler’s gods are no longer Olympian certainties but unstable composites: Mercury the messenger entangled with a fragile bee, Venus born not of sea foam but supernova remnants, Mars armored in bubbles that threaten to burst. The sublime has not vanished; it has migrated into the hybrid, the accelerated, the perpetually recombinant. Its grandeur now carries the pathos of decay and the thrill of reinvention.

Standing before these prints, one senses the migration Wühler describes: “the constantly accelerating migration of objects from analogue to virtual space and vice versa.” In the cool materiality of aluminum and steel, the hot flux of digital imagery finds temporary rest. The result is neither purely virtual nor purely physical, but something new—art that feels both archival and prophetic. In an era when every image is raw material for the next, Wühler reminds us that meaning still emerges through deliberate recontextualization. These are not illustrations of hybridity; they are its eloquent, shimmering proof.

 

Hot Options
Prelude

These works do not clamor for attention. They simply arrive, each one composed of two quiet presences — digital phantoms drawn from the collections of the Lincoln Museum in the United Kingdom and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Freely offered by the museums, unburdened by copyright, they exist in a state of perfect reproducibility, as if the idea of scarcity itself had gently dissolved.

In Martin Wühler’s Hot Options (2015), presented in the exhibition 2.5.0. Object is Meditation and Poetry at the Grassi Museum in Leipzig, these scanned and printed forms are introduced into the museum’s permanent display. Printed in unassuming, even poor material, they enter into an uneasy companionship with the local collection. The Grassi, like so many institutions, can show only about three percent of what it holds. The rest remains in storage, subject to the slow, inexorable poetry of decay. Wühler’s gesture stages a deliberate intermingling: foreign objects, weightless in origin, now physically present among works tied to Saxon soil and memory.

One feels the arbitrariness of the encounter, and with it a subtle melancholy. What does it mean for a museum to open its rooms to these digital immigrants, these perfect copies that require no climate control, no restoration, no reverence beyond the click of a printer? There is a quiet questioning of sustainability here — not merely of materials, but of cultural focus. When everything can be mixed, exchanged, and duplicated without loss, does the museum risk diluting the very particularity that gives it meaning for its region? Local heritage, once anchored in place and rarity, finds itself in conversation with a global stream of interchangeable likenesses.

Wühler does not lecture. He allows the unease to settle. In an era when the aura of the original has grown thin, when Benjamin’s lament feels less like prophecy than daily condition, these modest printed objects become meditative instruments. They ask us to consider what we preserve, and why, when the boundary between the irreplaceable and the infinitely reproducible has all but vanished. The sculptures themselves are less important than the atmosphere they create: a soft, disquieting poetry of mixing, loss, and uncertain continuity.