Philip Mueller: SIC TRANSIT GLORIA LUPI

Megan Mulrooney Gallery is pleased to present SIC TRANSIT GLORIA LUPI, an exhibition of new paintings by Austrian artist Philip Mueller. The exhibition will be on view from January 18 to February 8 in Los Angeles and will also include a mural by the artist.

Mueller’s paintings inhabit a postapocalyptic terrain where fragments of an old world persist under the weight of contemporary civilizational decay. His compositions, steeped in references to Western art history, draw from modernist and early modern aesthetics without succumbing to nostalgia. Instead, they evoke worlds suspended in transition—fractured, uneasy, and marked by the difficulty of envisioning what lies beyond present collapse. 

Melding classical mythology, Romantic landscapes, and the detritus of contemporary ruin, Mueller’s works reject pastiche as a purely ironic gesture. Instead, history is folded into the present, ruptured yet inescapable. Familiar settings—abandoned pools, alpine vistas, sprawling pastures—become destabilized. Here, memory and invention intertwine, producing images that flicker between the art historically familiar and newly dystopic. 

Mueller’s figures embody rebellion, longing, and excess, traversing landscapes littered with remnants of human intervention: graffiti-scrawled walls, crumbling facades, and overgrown ruins. Knights turn vigilante, clad in jean cutoffs and cowboy boots, their ancient, menacing masks betraying sly cartoon faces poised to wink at the viewer. These archetypes move through scenes where culture and nature negotiate an uneasy truce. These settings aren’t merely backdrops but active participants in Mueller’s world, metaphors for a world caught in a precarious state of reinvention. Mueller’s brushwork mirrors such dissonance, with textures that jolt and unsettle, emphasizing the materiality of paint. In Mueller’s hands, ruin isn’t an end point but a volatile threshold, where imagination pushes against the limiting force of disarray.