Anyone encountering Richard Müller’s paintings is unexpectedly drawn into a fantastical, often surreal visual universe brimming with physical confrontations, psychological abysses and sensual allusions. Reality and fantasy, closeness to nature and absurdity, old-master meticulousness in detail and sphinx-like ambivalence merge seamlessly – a realism of a somewhat different kind. Müller’s nude figures draw inspiration from antiquity to Max Klinger, without losing any of their unmistakable individual character. In precisely this manner, he also captures the athletic form of his ‘Läufer’ (engl. ‘Runner’) and its expansive forward movement in an isolated, almost timelessly static monumentality. He attaches a small King Charles Spaniel to the heels of the powerful protagonist’s heroic solemnity as an ironic antithesis. In this way, the playful lap dog opens up a multitude of possible interpretations for the viewer without having to be explicit. It is precisely this symbolism—so characteristic of Müller, nuanced, sultry and erotic, yet at the same time constrained hyperrealism—that appears so exaggerated that one is tempted to label it as conceptual. Richard Müller, who taught at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts for three decades, can rightly be regarded in retrospect as a pioneer of New Objectivity. Alongside Otto Dix and Georges Grosz, many others attended his drawing classes and owe their classical penchant for precision and the grotesque to him more than to anyone else. Alongside the radically flat paintings of Hermann Glöckner from the 1920s, Müller’s paintings seem like unwitting precursors to Pop Art. LM