Tamara Muller’s paintings are haunting portraits that plumb the depths of her own psychology, each picture a juxtaposition of the personal and the universal, exploring themes of power, domination and submission.
There is a sense of theatricality in these paintings, a narrative that owes as much to fairy tales as they do to the politics of the self. Her figures look at us unblinkingly, they forces us to look into their large unwavering eyes, make us ask questions of their innocence and transgressive adult behaviour.
Mullers graphic design training is stamped on each picture, her stylized portraits are rendered with an uncanny realism while other parts of the canvas are simply blocked out, unfinished as if the the context is irrelevant, unimportant, we only need concentrate our eye on the action, feed our desires and abnormalities into the situation presented to us. This participation between viewer and the subject creates a tension, an unsettling portrait of social morality and behaviour.
Muller’s pictures represent the game of life, it’s illusions and contradictions, and the universal truth that we all reflect ourselves in the mirror of others, our true selves hidden beneath the many layers of our neuroses and psychology. Here’s what she has to say about her work in an interview with artworksamsterdam.nl:
I use my own face because that way I feel I can be true. It is the instrument I know best, and I know how to use it. It is like ‘acting’. I make pictures of myself, which I use in sketches and collages. I use these when I paint on canvas. I never use a mirror. So it is not the painter looking at herself in the mirror while painting herself. Since my early childhood I make self portraits, it is something I need to do. My early work (before 2004) is all about my inner life, my demons, grief and fear. Stuff I could not express in another way. I tried to communicate as direct as I could without using words. So I let the girls look at the viewer as if talking to them with their eyes. Over the years I got more balanced. The paintings I make now are as much a portrait of ‘the self’ as about a universal theme as power. I like to create a sort of game between the viewer and the protagonists on the canvas. Both know they watch each other.?
I would call it [my painting] ‘imaginary realism’. Using traditional techniques and realistic elements in some parts and forgetting about ‘all that’ in other parts. The protagonist in my paintings is modelled on me. I paint scenes wherein distorted figures are engaged in an ambiguous game to create a delicate and destabilizing balance of opposites. I want to tempt the viewer with an ambivalent image, one which is seductive and yet at the same time disturbing. No coherent stories, but riddles with no solutions.