Markus Schinwald

Blaise Adilon
Amande Dionne

Venue

Usines Fagor

Lyon

Born 1973 in Salzburg, Austria.
Lives and works in Vienna, Austria, and New York, USA.

“A prosthesis for an undefined case” is how Markus Schinwald describes his protean oeuvre, which blurs the boundaries between the strange and the familiar. Inspired by Giulio Camillo’s theatre of memory, the artist has made a piece of panoptic architecture for the Fagor Factories. Unlike the Italian humanists of the Renaissance, he does not seek to offer a representation of universal knowledge; rather, the artist has constructed a multi-layered artwork that blurs the borders between historical epochs and framings, challenging a conventional perception of images, bodies, and their respective histories through algorithmic methods such as morphing and crossfading. In this space, Schinwald has paired his own works with items borrowed from local institutions. Thus emerges an iconography permeated by violence and injury – a mutilated Roman bust, facial casts of wounded World War One veterans – which encounters singular sculptures and modified Baroque paintings, all surrounded by a wall tapestry that polarizes images of civilization and decay, illusion and destruction.