Tracing the Wear of the Life of Labor. The visual art of Jan Muche (b.
1975, Herford; lives and works in Berlin) revolves around forms that
bring to mind structural steelwork, giant industrial installation
components, or scaffolding. His constructivist-abstract paintings and
sculptures look back on steel as a symbol of industrialization and the
working class, which featured in unflappably cheerful and adulatory
depictions that were characteristic of the twentieth century's
ideologies--Communism, Stalinism, National Socialism, actually existing
Socialism. Muche's roughhewn aesthetic combines proletarian charm with
the spirit of onward and upward, taking the beholder to regions not
untinged by dissonance. This book, supported by the Leinemann-Stiftung
für Bildung und Kunst, brings his reflections on the significance of
work and the impact of digital technology on physical toil as well as
his engagement with yesteryear's "heroes of labor" into focus. Jan Muche
trained as lithographer and studied with Karl Horst Hödicke at the
Hochschule der Künste Berlin.