Markus Schinwald: museum acquisition Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest acquires works

Following Markus Schinwald’s inclusion in the group exhibition The Portrait’s Home – Home Portraits, on view from 17 October 2024 until 16 March 2025 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, the museum has acquired four works by the artist.

Markus Schinwald's interdisciplinary body of work encompasses video, performance, dance, theatre, painting, photography, installation, and even puppetry. The artist creates mysterious and unsettling atmospheres that hint at their Viennese production context, through references to the austere Biedermeier style or to psychoanalysis. His work focuses on processes of manipulation and transformation of bodies and their environments. This emphasis is rooted in his early training in fashion and costume history, which not only awakened his general interest in clothing, but also drew his attention to the ways in which people are physically and emotionally limited by their cultural context.

Schinwald has declared himself a 'builder of prostheses for undefined cases', and alters 19th-century portraits by painting improbable apparatuses on the characters' faces and bodies, such as bandages, splints or wires that seem to fasten their limbs together. The artist has also developed a series of manipulated pieces of furniture, often using Biedermeier table or chair legs that are characteristic of the style valued by a growing middle-class in that period. He transforms these items by sawing off the legs and rearranging them in uncanny ways that often bring out their anthropomorphic qualities.