Reinhard Mucha was born in Düsseldorf, Germany in 1950 and studied with Klaus Rinke at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art, where he began to develop his highly complex artistic language that would find full form in a number of seminal installations in Europe and in the USA throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
These include Gladbeck at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris in 1986; Kasse beim Fahrer at Kunsthalle Bern and at the same time Nordausgang at Kunsthalle Basel; Mutterseelenallein at the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (M). in 1991-1999, and since 2009 as permanent installation at Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Torino; Das Deutschlandgerät at the 44th Venice Biennale in 1990, since 2002 as permanent installation at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, K21 Ständehaus, Düsseldorf; Wartesaal at Documenta X, Kassel in 1997; and Stockholmer Raum - For Rafael Moneo at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm in 1998.
Throughout Mucha’s artistic production of the past four decades run themes of collective identity, memory, nationalism, the psychology of architecture and power, the museum as the locus for the creation of history, and the merging of industrial, historical and political landscapes. His complex work penetrates several dualities: connectivity and isolation, temporality and permanence, intimate narrative and national history; progress and stasis.