Hoffman Donahue is pleased to present Walkthrough, its inaugural solo exhibition with the Austrian artist Ulrike Müller. This site-specific presentation centers on Müller’s enamel-on-steel paintings, situating them within a timeline that physically spans the exhibition space, back office, and stairwell, documenting the conceptual and formal evolution of these works over the past 15 years.

Drawing is a generative core of the artist’s practice. From colored pencil sketches, Müller makes paintings in vitreous enamel, powdered glass fused to steel in a furnace. She later documents these compositions in digital vector diagrams, translating them into a technical vernacular.

Walkthrough extends an installation strategy that Müller developed at Ludwig Forum in Aachen, Germany, where her enamel-on-steel paintings hung atop an extended frieze of vector line drawings, wheat-pasted directly onto gallery walls. As curator Eva Birkenstock observed, “[this format offers] insights into the development of motifs and color constellations, charting formations and repetitions in a visual chronology,” allowing viewers to encounter both the finished paintings and the guiding, iterative processes usually concealed by such works.

At Hoffman Donahue, Müller adds another layer: large forms sponge-painted onto the gallery walls. Since 2012, murals have been increasingly central to the artist’s exhibitions, actively shaping how paintings are experienced. “I work a lot with transfers from one format, context, or material to another,” says Müller. “The starting point is always working with color and form, or, in compositional terms, with figure, ground, and frame.”