Reinhard Mucha has had a life-long fascination with Germany's railway and industrial landscape, particularly that of his local Ruhr valley. It has provided him with a rich source for sculptural invention as well as an ideal metaphor for his explorations of German national identity and personal recollection.

This important solo show at the Anthony d'Offay gallery will include four sculptures, two to be seen here for the first time, as well as a group of postcards, most painted in watercolour by the artist. The sculpture is made in the tough, utilitarian materials of Germany's industrial past, recalling public buildings (glass fronted cases, heavy felt, stained wood) or the factory and the workshop (cast iron, folding steel rulers). A wall piece, Norden, bears the name of a German railway station, one of the hundreds of six-letter station names that are part of Mucha's Wartesaal (Waiting Room), Mucha's first solo show and an early definition of terms for his subsequent formal explorations. Severe and geometric in form, this post-Beuysian vitrine can still evoke an almost nostalgic recollection of train travel. Another, newly completed, work in the exhibition bears the title Krupp, a name shared by an iron works town and an industrial dynasty, and synonymous with the history of German industry. Still, the artist's primary engagement is with formal concerns, and with his work's situation relative to the history of art rather than that of a nation or individual; the railway system is a formal device or framework for this engagement with artistic debate. There is a strong and seductive historical and even autobiographical dimension, but this in itself is an engagement with classic minimalism and a teasing challenge to the belief that it might be possible to expunge meaning entirely.

A more private and rarely revealed side of Mucha is in evidence in the other works on show here, a series of postcards painted in watercolour and sent to family and friends during a period the artist spent travelling in Corsica. It is an unfamiliar medium for Mucha, but we can identify familiar themes of memory, travel, autobiography and the importance of family relationships. Here, sketches and holiday scrapbook mementos (the local paper headline, a beer label) create a nostalgic recollection of the trip even before it is over, and one to be shared with those important to the artist. Each card shows wear, stamps, frankings in evidence of its own journey, made by the invisible network of the postal service, which like the railways is ruled by time and efficiency and extends across borders. Soon after dispersing his work according to this invisible web of relationships, however, Mucha felt the need to recall his 'Corsican Watercolours' and reunite them as a group. After almost ten years this project has been realised, in the publication of a book, Reinhard Mucha: fifty postcards, published by Walter König, Köln and available from the gallery during this exhibition.

The artist's first British exhibition was Weight on Drivers at the Anthony d'Offay Gallery in 1993. He has exhibited internationally since 1980, and represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 1990. Most recently, at this year's Documenta in Kassel, he installed Wartesaal, a continuously evolving work now twice the size of the original version of 1982.