Philip Müller (b. 1988, Vienna, Austria) is an Austrian painter whose large-scale canvases assemble a world that behaves less like a place than like a rumour passed between friends. Trained at the University of Applied Arts and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, he works with a recurring cast of invented figures, a loose aristocracy of lovers, athletes, mourners and hangers-on, who reappear from painting to painting in seaside towns and on islands that never quite resolve into geography. Colour arrives at full volume and form bends to the mood of the scene, so that each picture carries the charged, slightly unreliable atmosphere of a story told the morning after.

What holds the work together is this insistence on narrative as something lived rather than illustrated. Myth, Romanticism and European leisure culture are pulled into the same frame as the banal and the louche, and the references sit close enough to the familiar that we recognise them before we can place them. His monograph Palio di Vita (Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2023) follows this cast across a decade, while a recent turn to collaged portraiture has brought a rougher, darker register to the surface. Müller is a founding member of Wiener Achse, an association for transnational and intergenerational exchange in the arts, and his work has been shown in solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, Brussels, Dubai and Vienna, and held in the collections of the 21er Haus, Vienna, the Farook Foundation and the Salsali Private Museum, Dubai. The paintings reward the viewer who stays in the room a while, since their company, like the company they depict, tends to improve as the evening goes on.