ARTISTS

Josef Felix Müller (born on the 10th of December 1955 in Eggersriet) is a Swiss sculptor, graphic artist and painter. After completing his training as an embroidery designer, Josef Felix Müller began to develop artistically as an autodidact. His first works showed, among other things, the human body through pictures in which sexuality is expressed as a driving and provocative force, in 1981 three of his pictures were confiscated as "lewd publications". From 1982 he made life-size wooden sculptures with a chainsaw. The art historian Peter Weiermair considered Müller's figures, made with saws and ax cuts from poplar and willow trunks, “among the most concise formulations of figurative art of the eighties”. [1] In 1985 he founded Vexer-Verlag in St. Gallen and co-founded the Kunsthalle St. Gallen, which he also directed from 1993 to 1995. From 1996 to 1999 he worked as a lecturer in plastic design at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. In the last few years Müller returned to painting, in particular he concentrated on landscapes. In doing so, he processes his digital landscape photographs by enlarging them on the canvas and painting over them in many layers. This is how images such as the Lichtraum series (2006 and 2007) were created, with great luminosity and color. On May 24th, 2014, the artist was elected President in Turtmann on the occasion of the annual meeting of delegates of the Central Board of Visarte Switzerland (Professional Association of Visual Art - Switzerland). After 7 years he succeeds Heinrich Gartentor. Josef Felix Müller has lived and worked in St. Gallen since 1975.