MARKUS SCHINWALD

10 October 2007 - 27 January 2008

Augarten Contemporary
Center for Contemporary Art Belvedere Wien
Scherzergasse 1a, 1020 Vienna - Austria
Opening Hours: Thurs - Sunday (and all public holidays) from 11 am- 7 pm

T +43 (0)1 79 557 -134
F +43 (0)1 79 557 -136
public@belvedere.at
www.belvedere.at

Ten in Love, 2006
Filmstill
Photo: Sebastian Pfaffenbichler
Courtesy Markus Schinwald
© Markus Schinwald

MARKUS SCHINWALD

Markus Schinwald expresses himself in various media. His observation as an artist revolves around the human body. Human beings are invariably embedded in their cultural environment, where they are frequently enticed into developing compulsions, due to the restrictions they are subjected to. These are rendered noticeable by Schinwald in his fashion creations, as well as in his adaptations of ancient engravings in which the sitters are submitted to subtle manipulation. He also casts the protagonists of his films into prostheses, has them guided by puppets, or places their abstruse, trance-like, and repetitive actions in austere settings.

The Belvedere will be presenting the young artist's first one-man show in Austria. On an international scale, Schinwald, who is one of the most important Austrian artists of his generation, has already appeared in monographic exhibitions at Argos in Brussels; at the Frankfurt Kunstverein; at the Moderna Musset in Stockholm; and at the AAM in Aspen. The venue of the present show is Augarten Contemporary, the Belvedere's annex for contemporary art.

The starting point of the show are important works from the collection's own holdings, as well as the artist's presence in crucial exhibitions held at the Belvedere, such as Ulysses (2004), Das Neue 2 (2005), Kunst fürs 20er Haus (2005), and Freud in Kunstwerken (2006).

The Concept

For Augarten Contemporary, Schinwald is designing an exhibition in the form of a narrative. Neither are the individual works arranged next to one another, nor does he attempt to compile a chronological display or retrospective. Instead, an experiential continuum of a specific present is being created by incorporating temporality and spatial interferences. This exhibition is an event that needs to be experienced, it is coagulated time woven into a visual mise en scène. Schinwald's aesthetic approach of theatricality encompasses absorption, attention, and tranquillity. We constantly encounter human beings with their deficiencies on the threshold of fragility and compulsion, in a state of eventlessness and immersed in peculiar and meaningless actions. It is the communicative signs intrinsic to the body that Schinwald explores in human beings, puppets, and mechanical hybrids alike. What is rendered perceptible here are the presence of pain, the feeling of emptiness and loss, silence and mute desire, as well as the secret understanding of physical comprehension.

In Schinwald's aesthetic studies, the repertory of physical expression always appears in a dual guise. Like crying - which can be both willed and impulsive and express both compulsion and relief - each and every gesture is ambivalent at its core. Thus a gesture always means two things; on the one hand, it is a sign and a legible message, and on the other hand it inevitably is also involuntary expression. Consequently, each gesture is located in the uncontrollable realm between outward appeal and self-reflection, between interactive discourse and inward isolation, between body and language, between communication and emotional existence.

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Editor: Claudia Stein

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