Herta Müller – The Official Said

The Museum Langmatt is staging the first Swiss exhibition of collages by Herta Müller (*1953 in Nitchidorf / Romania, has lived in Berlin since 1987). She is considered one of the most significant German-language authors of the present day. Her central theme is the terrible experiences under the Romanian communist dictatorship. In her collages and novels, Herta Müller vividly describes how decades of surveillance, domination by the state, imprisonment and torture changed and destroyed people. In 2009, the author received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Herta Müller has been working on her collages for more than 30 years. She cuts out words one by one from newspapers and magazines, sticking them onto postcard‑sized cards to create poems. At the Langmatt, she exhibits 140 new artworks. For the first time, she has created works of art that relate to one another, forming a kind of lyrical autobiography. Artwork by artwork, one follows the lucid poetry and Müller’s ability to touch upon the unsayable. This incomparable world is small in format, but vast and powerful.

A publication incorporating the collages of Herta Müller will appear to accompany the exhibition, published by Hanser Verlag Munich.

Image: Herta Müller, no titel, 2020
paper collage, 14.8 × 10.5 cm