Markus Schinwald

Markus Schinwald is one of the most internationally acclaimed artists of his generation. In 2011 – almost at the same time as the major solo exhibition in Lentos Kunstmuseum – he is presented at the Austrian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

The graduate from the Linz Art University creates fascinating, highly independent work that makes masterly use of all contemporary artistic media and formats. Sculpture and the staging of spaces, film, photography, painting and reproduction techniques are used to trace out an artistic framework interest in manifold ways: the human body as a cultural construct between self-presentation and disciplining, convention, correction, neurotic ticks and unsuspected grace. Deformations of the psyche find disconcerting physical correspondences. Influences from art history and consumer culture, from critical theory, film history and contemporary TV, choreography, stage set and the world of cabaret come into view: sensual, humorous, intelligent unmistakable. Markus Schinwald’s exhibitions are highly complex arrangements, their fascination arising from an irritating contradiction between emotionally and aesthetically charged attraction and a recalcitrant rejection of a one-dimensional offer of meaning. Lifeless objects are
animated, puppets lead a life of their own, spaces present unexpected discoveries.

Kinetic objects dynamize static installations, sometimes performative appearances are part of the overall concept. Schinwald’s art operates at the center of the sense of time, telling of the charged field of living life: between coercion and play, subjection and liberation, failure and elegance.

Curator: Stella Rollig