Philip Mueller - NRT motorcycle hero expositur como, 2022

The figure stands on a plinth. That much is certain. Everything else is
in flux. He is dark-skinned, classically posed — the contrapposto stance,
weight shifted to one hip, head turned slightly to the side — a posture drawn
from Michelangelo’s canon and planted here in a scene that has nothing to do
with Renaissance Florence. His hair, if it is hair, erupts in white flame from
the crown of his head. Around his wrists and forearms, a pair of vivid neon-red
rubber gloves — prosaic, industrial, impossible to decode — blaze against the
deep blue-green ground like a signal. Inscribed on his chest, the letters NB
and a cross, as if branding a document or initialling a charter. At his feet,
on the plinth’s base, text: “IN HONOUR OF A MOST HONOURED HERO.”

Around this figure, a world has gathered that belongs to no single
tradition. Tropical vegetation presses in from all sides — palms, ferns, dense
foliage, all rendered in dark greens and midnight blues. Bats wheel through the
upper air and cluster in the undergrowth. A small pink flower has been laid at
the base of the plinth, an offering. Spectral forms — pale blue, almost
luminous, vaguely winged — drift through the upper half of the canvas. Behind
the figure, a large dark crescent or wing shape, painted with loose, circling
strokes. The light that illuminates the hero does not come from the sky; it
comes from within the painting, or from some imagined source, pooling around
the figure and leaving everything at the margins in atmospheric shadow.

The title instructs you in the language of the work’s extended fictional
universe: NRT — the Naxos Racing Team — is Mueller’s invented motorcycle and
racing gang, a subsidiary chapter of his larger Black Flamingo Sad Boys
mythology. “Expositur como” is the ecclesiastical term for a dependent chapel,
a satellite of a larger parish: a small sacred outpost. Mueller’s title
positions this painting as exactly that — a shrine to a local cult hero, an act
of neighbourhood devotion within the wider NRT mythology. The figure is both
monument and apparition. The plinth with its dedicatory inscription says: this
is official. The white flame for hair, the red gloves, the orbiting bats say:
this is not.

NRT motorcycle hero expositur como in the Context of
Mueller’s Practice

Philip Mueller (b. 1988, Vienna, Austria; lives and works in Vienna)
studied at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and served, crucially, as
an apprentice to Hermann Nitsch — the Viennese Actionist known for his
blood-saturated performances and his theory of art as total sensory experience,
as Gesamtkunstwerk in the most demanding sense. Mueller has described the
Nitsch apprenticeship as formative in a way that formal education could not
replicate: “Working with Nitsch was so intense. It was 24/7, out in this castle
and all over the world. I learned things you can’t learn in university — about
dealing with collectors, making up shows, processes, how art comes to be a
Gesamtkunstwerk like his.” That formation is visible in Mueller’s own practice:
an expansive world-building project built from invented characters,
mythologies, symbolic registers, and sustained narrative arcs that accumulate
across years of work.

The overarching mythology began in 2015 with the Black Flamingo Sad Boys
(BFSB) — Mueller’s autobiographical gang of outlaw hedonists, drawn from his
own circle of friends, who descend from the Austrian Alps in search of utopia
and proceed through a sequence of invented locations: the forest, the prison
island of Santo Stefano near Capri, the Beach Resort Tiberio. Each location
generates its own chapter of paintings, its own tone and cast of characters.
The NRT — Naxos Racing Team — arrived as a parallel sub-narrative, a gang of
drivers and riders within the larger mythology, their story unfolding at the
racetrack on Naxos island before migrating, in the 2022 works, to the Garden of
Monsters at Bomarzo and other charged sites. Mueller’s monograph

Palio di Vita, published by VFMK Verlag für moderne Kunst,
chronicles this world — the BFSBs, the NRT, and the Tiberio Beach Resort
residents — from their first appearance in 2016 through the narrative’s
subsequent phases.

The painterly lineage is as carefully assembled as the mythological one.
Mueller places himself within German and Austrian Romanticism — E.T.A.
Hoffmann, Lord Byron, the landscape as psychological projection — while drawing
figures from the Michelangelo tradition, symbols from pagan and Christian
iconography, and the visual grammar of pop culture and horror. The Brooklyn
Rail described his world as one in which “a neo-Romantic style is juxtaposed
with anarchist symbols, vaguely Fascist typography layers buildings, helmets,
and skin.” The Classical nude stands in the jungle. The dedicatory inscription
marks a fictional hero. The canonical gesture carries the neon gloves. This is
how Mueller’s paintings work: they are formally serious and content-wise delirious,
and neither quality qualifies the other.

The Case for Acquiring NRT motorcycle hero expositur
como for the Black Square Collection

Mueller is represented exclusively by Carbon 12, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai —
one of the founding galleries of the Alserkal Avenue ecosystem and among the
most internationally active of the UAE’s contemporary galleries, with a
twenty-year history of exhibiting artists whose careers subsequently
accelerated significantly. Carbon 12 participates in Art Dubai, Frieze London,
Art Basel, and NADA Miami; in 2022, in partnership with Macaulay & Co and
FIERMAN, it established DIANA in New York, which presented Mueller’s solo
exhibition

The Garden of Giants in its inaugural season. His work has been
reviewed in The Brooklyn Rail, Interview Magazine, Juxtapoz,
and Ocula. He has been the subject of multiple solo exhibitions at
Carbon 12 and a published monograph. He has shown at Art Dubai, Frieze London,
and NADA Miami. Most significantly, Carbon 12 was accepted for the first time
in its history to Art Basel Miami Beach in 2025 — a threshold moment for the
gallery’s international standing — and subsequently to Art Basel Doha in 2026,
the fair’s inaugural edition in the Gulf region. Both participations have
exposed Mueller’s work to an institutional collector base of a different order
of magnitude, and to an audience for which a Dubai gallery presenting a
Viennese painter rooted in Neo-Romantic mythology carries the weight of genuine
discovery.

This work was made in 2022, the year Mueller’s NRT narrative reached its
fullest international exposure, with the series shown simultaneously at Carbon
12 and at the inaugural DIANA New York. NRT motorcycle hero expositur como
is one of the largest-format works of that campaign — 200 × 140 cm, a scale at
which Mueller’s monumental figurative ambition operates at full power. For
Black Square, it is a work that carries both formal authority and narrative
depth: a painting in which a fictional mythology has produced something that
looks, with complete conviction, like a religious icon. The hero stands on his
plinth in the jungle. The bats circle. The red gloves glow. The inscription
holds.

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Interview
Magazine. “Inside Philip Mueller’s Dreams.” January 2016.

Brooklyn
Rail. “Philip Mueller: Last Days of Soft Machine.” December 2020.

VFMK
Verlag für moderne Kunst. Philip Mueller: Palio di Vita. (Monograph, chronicles
BFSBs, NRT and Tiberio Beach Resort.)

Carbon
12 / DIANA New York. “Philip Mueller: The Garden of Giants.” Exhibition,
December 2022 – January 2023.

Classic
Driver Magazine. “This Jaguar XJS is the Art Car Your Mother Has Always Warned
You About.” May 2022.