Untaped: Jochen Mühlenbrink
Cuturi Gallery is pleased to present Untaped, a new solo exhibition by German painter Jochen Mühlenbrink (b. 1980). The exhibition brings together a new body of works developed during his 2025 residency with the gallery, marking a return to Singapore following his previous exhibition AIR. In Untaped, Mühlenbrink deepens his ongoing inquiry into illusion, perception, and painterly deception through an expanded investigation of his Tape Series, while drawing continued resonance from the atmospheric ambiguity of his Window Paintings. Here, a single crease in a strip of tape or a bead of moisture on a fogged pane becomes a small event of perception: an ordinary detail briefly charged with heightened awareness. His works remind us that reality is constantly shaped by memory, sensation and by sight itself.
Mühlenbrink’s practice consistently returns to a simple question: What do we think we see, and why? Drawn to the technical possibilities of trompe-l’oeil, he recognised early on how painting can transform everyday materials into something entirely new. Over time, he has refined this into a clear visual language.
In the Tape Series, layered strips of tape, torn, curling at the ends, become the real focus. These works test the viewer’s familiarity with touch: the urge to peel, to smooth down, to lift a corner that isn’t really there. Through layers of paint, Mühlenbrink turns these banal materials into objects of deception. Even in their restraint, the works hold emotional charge in their precision, capturing familiar moments of tension, and hesitation. Alongside these new tape works, the exhibition includes paintings that extend the artist’s ongoing Window Paintings series. These fogged surfaces, blurred passages of light, and half-glimpsed forms continue his exploration of concealment and revelation. Tape layered over the windows both conceals and transforms what lies beneath, inviting the viewer into a playful investigation, revealing how much our engagement with reality depends on curiosity.
Across both series, Mühlenbrink performs a delicate balancing act. The works are highly technical yet quietly poetic, conceptual yet rooted in the materiality of lived experience. They challenge viewers not by tricking the eye, but by making visible the mechanisms of seeing. In the tension between deception and recognition lies the heart of his practice: an understanding that art both disrupts and restores our sense of reality.
Untaped by Jochen Mühlenbrink will be on view at Cuturi Gallery, Singapore from 29 November 2025 to 3 January 2026.
