Markus Schinwald
Known for his uncanny take on historical portraits, the Austrian artist continues his search for the curiouser and curiouser
Markus Schinwald is the first to admit he was hopeless as a fashion designer. But the Austrian artist’s early training in fashion design sparked a chain reaction that still informs his growing and unusual oeuvre.
Modified historical portraits put 46-yearold Schinwald on the map nearly a decade ago, and were widely seen in his Austrian pavilion for the 2011 Venice Biennale. These sentimental paintings and drawings portray middle-class Europeans, modified by Schinwald or his expert restorers to include bizarre representations of prosthetics or swathes of cloth on the subjects’ faces or bodies. Wire-rimmed spectacles, added to the image of an unknown 1800s dandy, might continue beyond the eyes, meander around the face, and then hook into his lips. The effect is uncanny, but also humorous; and the prosthetics, as eerie and potentially painful as they seem, are not meant to depict instruments of torture. ‘They alternate between pathos and slapstick,’ explains the artist, sitting in the chandeliered Café Bazar in his native Salzburg.
Schinwald’s preoccupations with the body – its failings, forms and movements, but also the clothing or objects that might cover or modify it – have been a leitmotif through his career, which launched in Berlin in the mid1990s and also encompasses film, sculpture, set design and spatial installation. After studying fashion design and art in Austria in the early 1990s, he enrolled at the German capital’s Humboldt University cultural studies department. It was a time and place in which fashion and art were dancing closely, and Schinwald’s training as a tailor began to meet his conceptual, intellectual mindset.
‘My first art piece was called Jubelhemd (Elation Shirt, 1997). I just sewed the sleeves of a man’s shirt on upside down,’ he says. The simple intervention forced the shirt’s wearer to hold his arms in the air, making the piece a straitjacket of sorts, forcing the expression of celebration or, conversely, surrender. In a 1990s collaboration with a Russian dance troupe, Schinwald explains, one performer wore the shirt, while another wore a chain that Schinwald made to be worn around the head and hooked into the lips, forcing the dancer to smile. ‘It’s like delegating; you don’t have to smile because an object is doing it for you. That was the start with the prosthetics.’
Schinwald’s work could be read as a kind of fetishism: ‘A fetish is highly individual; it doesn’t work for anybody else. In the idealised version, a fetish is the key to a different world. I thought it would be great if art could do something similar,’ he says. But it’s also about time, juxtaposing earlier periods of European history with the present – the two-dimensional images he transforms come from real-life or online flea markets (‘I spend at least an hour a day on online auctions,’ he admits, laughing).
More recent work sees him creating sculptures from curvy legs removed from 19th-century chairs and tables. Assembled into dynamic anthropomorphic forms or kinetic machines, the legs look vaguely erotic, and according to the artist, were always meant to be so. ‘The British carpenter Chippendale tried to imitate human legs; the Victorians were so prudish they covered them,’ he says. ‘But with lace. I turned them into fancy, slightly perverted sculpture.’
Schinwald now divides his time between Vienna and New York. He’s friendly and talkative, peppering a perhaps typically Viennese intellectual rigour and psychological depth (he teaches a spatial phenomenology course at Yale) with American openness and optimism. Besides monographic exhibitions at art institutions such as the CCA Wattis Institute in San Francisco or Magasin III in Stockholm, he has been working on concepts and even choreography with the Royal Swedish Ballet, and with an experimental theatre festival in Vienna. His newer two-dimensional work departs from the prosthetic portraits and takes historical paintings and enlarges them, extending their canvasses thread by thread, surrounding figuration with almost modernist abstraction.
Right now, the artist is contemplating what to do with 25 coin-operated kiddie rides – historical children’s contraptions found in small carnivals – he ‘accidentally’ acquired a year and a half ago. It’s a departure from his usual aesthetic. ‘There’s so much crazy stuff out there,’ he says, grinning, as if he’s in on a secret. He probably is. * ropac.net
Hussein Chalayan: What is your relationship to individuality? Markus Schinwald: My work has a lot to do with individuality. The prostheses are highly individual, because a prosthetic always marks a unique deficit. In a way, I’m highlighting our individual inadequacies.