MARKUS SCHINWALD AT CAPC - INTERVIEW

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.

For a decade or so, Markus Schinwald 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 oeuvre in the depths of contemporary desire, alienation and fetishism.

Markus Schinwald was born in 1973.
He lives and works in Vienna.