About Frans Muhren

Frans Muhren trained as a sculptor at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and has been working as a visual artist for fifty years. He makes both paintings and sculptures. In his sculptures Muhren works with volume, mass and lines that suggest movement. He has used all possible materials and techniques, but nowadays he mainly works in iron because this material is most suitable for larger sculptures. He usually paints the result with acrylic paint. The shape comes first. He immediately sees whether his work is ‘spatially’ good, but the colours are less obvious. Whether the interplay between form and colour is the correct one, is something he only sees if he does not look at the sculpture for a while.

Frans Muhren has always told stories in his work. In addition to the Streamers series, he creates sculptures with mythological figures, celestial bodies, geometric symbols, or elements from pop culture. In such sculptures he often punches letters and numbers. Playful or absurdist work always returns, in which he is not averse to social criticism. In addition to his studio in Amsterdam, Muhren has a workshop in the Beemster. There lies a pile of scrap iron in various shapes and sizes. When he is working, he has a picture of that chaos in his head which according to him is good for the creative process. It helps to find new forms and possibilities. There is a pleasant element of chance: he stumbles upon things he was not looking for, but which turn out to work very well (serendipity). Characteristic of his work is that it is anything but static. The colourful Garden Mobile 2 even literally moves when the wind plays with it.

His Dark Angel is built from leftover pieces that Muhren welded together. In this he followed his intuition. He added wings to the figure that he had already made before and saw that a descending angel had emerged from the shape. The slanting branches with spheres suggest movement, comparable to drawn speed in a cartoon. The small objects like the crows came last.