Museums today are like railway stations: both are transitional places of placelessness.

Frankfurter Block represents Reinard Mucha‘s artistic attempt to analyze the insanity of capitalistic forces within the art field through an idea of permanent transition. With subtle criticism and bitter irony, the German artist shows how consumerism and marketing enter into an alliance as the art works enter the museum. The mesmerising quietness often experienced by the public within the exhibition spaces is just an appearance which hides that a new upcoming exhibition has already been planned. Caught in the demand-driven economic dynamic, art lost its magic aura and became a product of fast-consumption connected to certain social and cultural status. By exploring transportation metaphors, Frankfurter Block also questions the traditional meaning assigned to the “work of art” and brings it to an open definition. The Block is made of an ensemble of eleven works previously showcased at Galerie Grässlin, Frankfurt in 2012. For the Berlin show, Mucha recreated the scale and proportions of the main room of Galerie Grässlin, building a gallery within the main space of Sprüth Magers. The artist added interior details, such as a carpeted floor and linen-clad walls, referring to Joseph Beuys’s art. The patience and precision employed in sculptures / installations such as Untitled, made of several vitrines filled with promotional materials from a massive coupon campaign which he had instigated himself, showcase important features of Reinhard Mucha‘s barely obsessive artistic approach. As part of the Frankfurter Block, Capriccio – How the dead hare consorts with the pictures (2012), pays another homage to Joseph Beuys’s The Pack (1969), except that here the sledges are replaced with the upturned trolleys used in museums to move art works upon which Mucha placed felt blankets from the art transportation company Hasenkamp. Although everything plays on the idea of movement, the artist manages to compress the temporal element to a point of perfect stillness which impedes the normal flow of time.  

By overcoming the time and space limits of museums, art fights the centrifugal forces of current history.