Markus Schinwald

La Triennale di Milano is pleased to present Markus Schinwald. Il dissolute punito, a solo exhibition of works by the Austrian artist Markus Schinwald. Thanks to the generous help of La Scala opera house, the exhibition includes a selection of stage designs by Michael Levine, which were produced by the Milanese theatre during the 2011-2012 season for the performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni, conducted by Daniel Barenboim and directed by Robert Carsen. In a unique and highly original manner, the project, curated by Paola Nicolin, combines artistic research and production with devices for scenic representation. On this special occasion, the stage scenery of an opera is lent to the visual arts, bringing about an imaginary dialogue that conjures up the atmospheres and echoes of themes that are found as much in Schinwald’s work as in the elusive legend of Don Giovanni. The borderlines between the public and private spheres become blurred and the setting that emerges brings with it a unique interaction between the stage scenery and the themes of desire, obsession, time and the human body. These are all key concepts in the artistic research of the Austrian artist, who was born in Salzburg in 1973. In an experimental combination of artistic languages, the exhibition takes visitors into a world poised between art and reality, where theatre, painting, video and sculpture are combined, and plunges them into scenic and psychic spaces that are both disorienting and enigmatic.

Edoardo Bonaspetti, curator Triennale Art

One of the most important visual artists of his generation, Markus Schinwald (Salzburg 1973) has caught the attention of critics and public alike with the depth of his intellectual research, which is based on an awareness of the interplay between sculpture, body and space, of the fragility of language and of the power of what is repressed in the human psyche. Over the years, Schinwald has managed to create a very particular imaginative world in a series of works that range from painting to performance, photography and puppetry, and from video to sculpture, drawing and the creation of clothes, through to architectural designs. He takes these elements, which are like fragments of a single aesthetic discourse, and arranges them into a choreography that concentrates on the psychological implications of the study of space and the body. A meticulous explorer of the mysterious mechanisms that underlie human relationships, more often than not Schinwald finds himself designing the spaces that contain his art. His works are like actors or extras in a story with no beginning and no end, inside a stage set. Like a sort of prosthesis, the set is an essential piece of equipment, even though its actual purpose is never quite clear. This tendency to distribute objects in space is linked to his visual arts studies, but above all to his interest and attitude, which he himself often mentions, in the hybridisation between the making of a film, an exhibition, a sculpture, a performance all embracing a similar dramaturgy within a stage or set device.

In his solo exhibition in Milan, Schinwald interacts for the first time with the scenery of La Scala and, in particular, with a selection of scenic wings created by the opera house in 2011 for the performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni. A significant number of works created by the artist since 1996 are placed in a stage set chosen partly because it is so completely non-figurative. The wings, which simply reproduce the curtain of the La Scala theatre, have been designed to be seen from front and back, with openings in the place of doors and windows, and a system of self-supporting trolleys means that they can swivel on themselves. This makes the wings not only unstable, but a structure that both divides and unites. These elements highlight the theme of ambiguity and ambivalence that runs right through Mozart’s opera, which constantly wavers between comedy and tragedy, stage and audience, men and women, individuals and community, good and evil, love and death. The architectural system is thus capable of capturing and dragging the viewer into an open situation that is both destabilising and uncertain. The viewer is both a witness behind the scene and an actor on the stage. In this way, the anti-spectacle becomes the spectacle and vice versa in a twisting exhibition discourse that blurs sculpture with scenography in a whole. In this manner, Schinwald takes up and works on the idea that the shape of an object influences behaviour, giving greater impact to this concept by illustrating psychological situations that are quite unique in the way that they conjure up questions of identity, instability, discomfort and limitations. The idea of suggesting this sort of interaction with Teatro alla Scala to Schinwald first came from an observation of his work, and in particular the Culbutos, the new sculptural group on show at La Triennale. These resin and carbon fiber shapes wobble on their own axis and this characteristic movement is a reference to the children’s toys (“roly-poly dolls” on a hemispherical base, which always return to an upright position), as well as to the world of theatre and its costumes, which also manipulate the body, making it adopt unconventional poses and shapes. Their translucent surfaces reflect our every movement, while their rather alienating appearance points to the artist’s interest in subverting the rules that govern the way the human body is portrayed, through a convergence of gestures and actions, forms and moods. Stage sets and works of art thus come together to form a device that manipulates the body, forcing it along more or less compulsory lines in order to bring into question its relationship with the unconscious, the irrational, the ambiguous, the unstable and the double.

Paola Nicolin, curator