12 March – 9 April 2016

Through his protean work, Markus Schinwald explored a range of media such as video, drawing, sculpture and installations to shape a world that enables a dialogue between theatre, sociology, philosophy, psychology and even fetishism. As part of his pictorial creation process, Schinwald used old paintings, most of which date back to the Biedermeier period, which he altered by adding incongruous elements such as prostheses. With this iconoclastic gesture, the artist created a timeless piece that does not, or no longer, corresponded to a particular aesthetic style, whether in terms of time period or genre. Contrary to such a restrictive artistic practice, with each exhibition Schinwald takes the viewer through an initiation journey as the experience is not only visual but also charged with physical empathy.

For New Works, Schinwald chose to display a new series of large-scale paintings as well as several installations mimicking machines in motion. In these paintings, he proceeded differently. While he kept the entire canvas in his early works, he assembled two paintings: a historical painting, including one or more figures, and a new canvas that redefined the context. Schinwald’s new pictures broke away from his older works, where the focus of the painting was mostly on painted faces and prosthetic devices. Here the characters freed themselves from their restricting implements and apparently relieved themselves from a psychological burden. They entered an all new composition as the very scale of the canvas gave each figure the size of an almost anecdotal statuette. The background removed any narrative, iconographic or temporal anchor, revealing a mysterious setting out of which only hints of geometric shapes, materials, reflections or nuances emerge. Here, a shift was seen in Schinwald’s usual repertoire: the prosthesis was no longer representational; it became contextual and conceptual. The psychological shackles are no longer embodied in the identifiable physical object as they took a more abstract form through a composition that recreated the conditions of mental confinement.

This phenomenon occurred simultaneously with the artist’s installations. His “machines” incorporated a repetitive movement, borrowed from 19th century clockwork, contained within a white frame. The sculptures’ continuous motion evoked a repetitive choreography. The cogwheels, the cylindrical coulmn’s mechanical organ and the wooden furniture were substitutes for the legs and joints of the puppets that we see in Markus Schinwald’s previous creations. Beyond these mechanisms, the artist limited his latest sculptures to the basic geometric shape of the rectangle. This rectangle became an outline and as such they evoked the theme of the window introducing an interplay between solid and void, creating a symbolic dialogue between inside and outside, introspection and extroversion. These sculptures allowed for another view on Schinwald’s paintings thus enabling us to interpret them anew.