Downtown Artist Lilli Muller

Meet Muller
Lilli Muller is a mid-career artist living and working in Downtown Los Angeles. Muller is best known for her three-dimensional body casts, which capture her models at different stages in their life.

Muller moved from Germany to Laguna Beach California in 1980. Germany's stifling school and job market forced Muller to repress her artistic creativity. Muller was introduced to body casting through a friend while living in Laguna. After years of trying to imagine how to turn her drawings into three dimensional figures, Muller knew body casting was the next art form she wanted to pursue.

After ten years of working in the Laguna art community, Muller abandoned the beach for urban downtown Los Angeles living in 1991. She has seen the growth of Downtown's artistic community, even managing her own gallery on Gallery Row for a period.

Muller's next project called "La Vie En Rose" is three years in the making. It showcases the casts of women all ages at different life stages. Complimenting the body casts are documentary videos and interviews of each woman plus personal write-ups that Muller has her subjects write about their life.





How Muller Makes Her Body Art

Muller's body castings take place during her "art happenings" where subjects strip down nude and are covered in Vaseline. Then Muller wraps plastered strips around their bodies until it is dry enough to be cut off. Then the molds are hardened with fiber glass.

Muller uses the concave and convex shape of the casts to create her art. Perhaps she will cover the molds in organic materials like rose petals or bark, and often the stories of her subjects will be written on their molded frame.

For more of Muller's art visit her website at http://www.lillimuller.com/.