What do we know about Reinhard Mucha? The official biography:

This biography is surprisingly revealing.

We know that he has a profound sense of place, and placelessness. His place is Düsseldorf; more specifically, his studio, his burrow, the refuge of all things and all notions, a building with a history, where he has laid out a labyrinthine network of workspaces – workplaces – conducive to his modus operandi and means of production. This is his domain. Here he submits himself to the discipline of his vocation – he speaks feelingly and unaffectedly of the demands the work makes on him – creating and recreating, assembling and disassembling, constructing and deconstructing, collecting and reflecting, hoarding and restoring. ‘Everything here is a Mucha,’ he says, with a touch of pride, of the restoration work on the building; and indeed the whole project is a giant Mucha – less a studio than an ecosystem.

Like Kafka's burrow, it is a life's work. ‘All the great artists have been great workers,’ as Nietzsche knew, ‘inexhaustible not only in invention, but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering.’ Mucha is nothing if not a great worker.

He is also a master craftsman – a woodworker, a metalworker. He was once a blacksmith. He so loved art that he joined the artillery, as Apollinaire liked to boast; doing his military service he became a trained geometer. Technical drawing is part of the discipline. His art is arduous: a perfectionist reconciliation of vision and precision. He has practical wisdom – a nut and bolt sit in the top of his sugar shaker to stop the flies getting in – and a certain intellectual rigour. When the jury at the 1990 Venice Biennale gave him one of three special awards for ‘the rigour and precision of his work’, they may have chosen to ignore the historical and political dimensions of an installation called The Germany Machine or The Germany Device (1990/ 2002), but they were not altogether wrong. His métier is meticulousness.