For his first solo exhibition in the UK, acclaimed Austrian artist Markus Schinwald presents a group of large-scale oil paintings belonging to the same series featured in his celebrated installation Panorama (2022), shown at the 16th edition of the Lyon Biennale. He employs a painterly visual language that oscillates between abstraction and figuration, the past and the present, incorporating technoid blurs of pixels and vertical purple lines suggestive of numerical glitches on a computer. Representing Schinwald’s interest in reconfiguring historical imagery and modes of production within distinctly contemporary frameworks, the paintings are displayed on the ground floor of the gallery alongside anthropomorphic wooden sculptures made from antique furniture and a selection of black-and-white prints of erased monuments.
I’m interested in alternative methods of historiography. While traditional art history establishes a teleology of the progression and development of images, my approach is non-mensual. These are attempts at a future historiography – as with science fiction, they are place-holders for a future memory, built with fragments of the past. Just before the old images recede, they catch the light for a final time.
— Markus Schinwald
Following a series of solo exhibitions in Europe and the USA, Schinwald cemented his international reputation at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, when he filled the Austrian Pavilion with a labyrinthine structure suspended from the ceiling. His interdisciplinary approach to artmaking encompasses video, performance, dance, theatre, painting, photography, sculpture and installation. Exhibited widely in solo and group presentations, Schinwald’s work is held in prominent collections, including that of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; SFMoMA, San Francisco; Museum Belvedere, Vienna; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg; Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris; Kunsthaus Zürich; and Tate, London.
