Armin Mühsam’s work has evolved over time. Where once he imbued his architectural landscapes with politics, speaking to mankind’s infringement and impact on the natural world, “the message now is purely aesthetic,” he says. “It’s the creation of visually compelling compositions.” 

The striking lines and shapes of his exhibit Dissident Formalisms reflect that. Mühsam’s works continue to reference architecture and the confrontation between human geometry and nature, but much more abstractly. They also reach subtly to the past, sampling and repurposing modernist techniques of the late 19th and early 20th centuries – comparable, he says, “to the way a jazz musician would riff on a 100-year-old jazz standard, putting it into a new arrangement, maybe using some basic melodic features but then being very free and exploratory with the present composition.” 

Mühsam is a professor of painting at Northwest Missouri State University who maintains a studio in Kansas City’s West Bottoms. His artwork has been featured in exhibitions and venues across the U.S. and internationally from his native Romania to Munich, Paris, and Budapest.