Published on the occasion of Markus Schinwald's exhibition at the
CAPC Museum of Contemporary Art of Bordeaux from May 16 to September 15, 2013.
After he transformed the whole nave of the CAPC Museum into a mechanical theatre, Markus Schinwald conceives an elegant and sophisticated artist's book that reflects this physical and mental adventure through preparatory prints, film dialogues, and a series of stickers alternating exhibition views and reproduction of works.
After he transformed the whole nave of the CAPC Museum into a mechanical theatre, Markus Schinwald conceives an elegant and sophisticated artist's book that reflects this physical and mental adventure through preparatory prints, film dialogues, and a series of stickers alternating exhibition views and reproduction of works.
The CAPC's nave is plunged in darkness. A gigantic
brass tubular structure straddles the space. Painted skies and
retouched portraits hanging on wires are being as if launched into the
void. The walls are covered with Brinjal. Tumblers play chess and
children's puppets bang the metal tips of their shoes on the floor. A
spiral Eiffel stairway links the floor and the ceiling, 45 feet high.
Large hangings hide the architecture, a double mirror projection of the
film Orient spins in a loop and looks at itself from a huge triangular
bench which cuts the nave in four. A false ceiling with holes in it lets
through a purplish light, while a figure on a suspended diving board
vibrates with the variations of light. Welcome inside Markus Schinwald's
mechanical theatre, a space made to measure for the CAPC's nave, which
gropes as much as it traps. The publication pupblished by the CAPC
reflects this physical and mental adventure through preparatory prints,
film dialogues and stickers alternating exhibition views and
reproduction of Schinwald's works.
Markus Schinwald (born in 1973) has been dividing his life
between Vienna and Los Angeles. Between Freud and Lynch, Prater and
Mulholland Drive, Biedermeier and the Black Sun. He moves from one world to
the other the way people switch channels. In a trice. With the same
fluidity, he tacks between performance, visual arts and films, without
sticking to any particular medium. Schinwald came to art via fashion and
theory, and displays a pronounced liking for detail and curiosity, a
fascination which sets his œuvre—a highly charged aesthetic
collection of curios in which the human being, transformed into
marionette-like dolls by physical extensions, prostheses, and mechanical
apparatuses, stands in the focal point of observation—in the depths of
contemporary desire, alienation and fetishism.