Markus Schinwald

An eleven-hour clock. A 21st century contortionist reading in the half-light of a seventies interior that glitters with bronze and gilt. The lithographed portrait of a 19th century bourgeois, his face now hidden behind a white scarf. A life-size marionette on a swing, dressed in a grey suit. A procession of children pursuing a marionette in a graffitoed medieval village. A pair of women’s shoes without heels. A jacket with arms that attach the wearer’s arms behind his back. A diptych representing twins, painted in the 1920s and touched up in 2004 in the painter’s style. A small 18th century landscape printed out and blown up to the size of a wall. The film of someone dancing in a brownish, aristocratic interior that looks half abandoned… Welcome to the witty, eccentric and disturbing world of Markus Schinwald.

From the age of five, Markus Schinwald (born in Salzburg in 1973) worked in the opera. He played the piano for several years without knowing why, and came to art through both fashion and theory. For the last few years he has been active on two distinct scenes: dance and performance on the one hand, visual art and exhibitions on the other. He explores not only the connections that these two domains may weave between themselves, but also their potential for compatibility. Schinwald’s work is a permanent blending of styles, epochs, identities and sexualities, alluding, in a very individualist way, to psychoanalysis, historical myths and cultural theories. Prosthetics and mechanical appliances constrain the protagonists of his films and photographs, and introduce questions of manipulation and domination in the era of post-appropriation art. In Schinwald’s work the human body is always transformed in some way; most often, it is transformed into a cultural artefact. And the adulterated object ‘is not immediately soluble in signification’; it resists, disturbing even the space of dreams; it turns into an alien being. Markus Schinwald adapts his aesthetics of manipulation to the stories that he wants to tell and the mystical/materialistic and idiosyncratic habitats in which he wants to see them taking shape. He gives a lot of thought to the image of these habitats.

For the screening of his new film at the Brétigny Art Centre, Schinwald has chosen to immerse the spectator in a floating space. Between the ghostly hotel lobby (a place where people ‘co-exist aimlessly’, in Siegfried Kracauer’s words) and the screening hall, he has assembled a dozen portraits that he has touched up to give them a S&M flavour. In what seems a horrific romance, part seduction, part nightmare, he has united them with contortionists on top of their form, while a new, life-size marionette sits on a long bar behind which the new film is projected.

Alexis Vaillant

The film is co produced with Argos, Brussels. Exhibition at Argos from 22 April to 24 June 2006. www.argosarts.org

Markus Schinwald
Kurator: Alexis Vaillant