(Art)Before Markus and I sat down for our interview, we talked for over an hour. We know each other from a time when he was still a student and I had just started working in advertising. That was thirty years ago. Back then, our shared circle of friends would go to art exhibitions, concerts or dinner at night. It was a creative time of new beginnings and discovery. A time that—as it turns out in the course of our conversation—has stayed with us and still influences both of our lives.

MAison ë We last saw each other almost thirty years ago. A lot has happened in your life in the meantime. How would you describe your journey since?

Markus Schinwald There is always a view from the inside and one from the outside. From the outside, my path probably seems restless and too eventful to find a meaningful dramaturgy in it. But for me, from the inside, it wasn’t like that at all. I have always remained a seeker in a sense, on a quest to find happiness. Although happiness came along the way. It was important to me to slip into different roles. The more contrasting and different they were, the more exciting I found them. Just as the role of the professor is a new one that is only defined and shaped by practice—by doing. Or the role of the exhibition designer who directs the gaze and the attention, shaping the experience in the process.

M. ë How do you define art?

M. S. I don’t. What interests me in what I do is maybe ten percent about art. Whether something is art or not is irrelevant to me. It also makes no sense to fight against institutional definitions of art. Art is what is defined as such by the art world.

M. ë How would you describe your art (concerning today’s world)?

M. S. My work is a question about the state of the world. As the world has changed a lot in the last ten years, my work has changed with it. A change of perspective is important to me. What does the world look like from the perspective of a 20-year-old or a museum curator? I see my work as an amalgam of the truth.

M. ë You initially studied fashion? Why was that?

M. S. That was a decision I made at 14 years old, not knowing what fashion was. I learned tailoring from scratch and it’s been a constant presence ever since. The choice of colors, of materials, the transfer of two-dimensionality into three dimensions and the question of what function the body plays in such an approach. I used to deal with body issues in my work, but I hardly do that anymore.

M. ë Where do the boundaries between fashion and art converge for you?

M. S. In my work. I’ve drawn these boundaries quite clearly. Fashion served a kind of longing, especially in the 1990s. In the work of artists like Anne Imhof (German media artist), the boundaries blur and merge, the dividing line is more difficult to discern. The questions in art and fashion are similar. What is the heritage in art or in fashion? What kind of memory does it have? Fashion has a short-term memory. Art has a long-term memory. The older I get, the more interested I am in long-term memory.

M. ë What interests you in terms of art? When did you know you wanted to work as an artist?

M. S. That was never a conscious choice. I created things that others wanted to exhibit. I became an artist in the same way a teenager imitates an adult until they become one. That’s how we grow into our roles. We imitate until we are.

M. ë Which artists do you admire? Which have inspired you?

M. S. Those that don’t have any discernible edges. The market changes a lot in that regard. If you inquire about the ten most famous contemporary composers today, hardly anyone will be able to provide you with a clear answer. A hundred years ago, that was a different story. The same goes for art. You can already observe a type of crowd art on TikTok. Great works with a wide range of creators. Big names like Picasso or Gerhard Richter are a thing of the past. Heroic stories are disappearing from art. I also see that with my students, they don’t care about that anymore.

M. Ë You also work as a curator (for the EVN Collection). Whose work would you buy right now?

M.s. Personally, I’m most likely to buy works from the Renaissance. But I’m a bad investment advisor. As a collection, we mainly do commissions. So we work with ten artists a year and let them develop something for us.

M. Ë You currently work with existing works that you buy at auctions and then modify. Is the starting point always the original work? When you see a picture, do you immediately see where the journey could take you? Where do you get the ideas and inspiration for your works? What is the process like and how long does it take you to complete a painting?

M.s. When I buy a painting, I don’t know exactly what I want to do with it, but I can see the potential. I used to paint onto pictures and change them as a result. Today I repaint them. The original pictures remain technically intact and I also take the technical information from them and continue painting in this technique. However, I combine a Baroque painting with, for example, the style of the 1950s. The knowledge from the painting informs my choice of colors and brushes. It can then give a picture two to three temporal transitions that you hardly notice. In music, there is a term for this: a counterfactual. I may paint a surface that looks like a Rothko, but I paint it with a size two Baroque brush—a very delicate brush where the paint application takes correspondingly longer. Different distances can also be combined in one picture. I look at a small baroque painting from a short distance. An abstract work from the 1950s needs a greater distance. The design process is always digital, so I create a one-to-one template for the restorer or myself.

M. Ë Do you also take commissions?

M.s. Yes, I have also done commissioned work. Fewer portraits, more abstract painting that is combined with something figurative which blurs the line between figurative and abstract.

M. Ë You’ve represented Austria at the Venice Biennale, exhibited in major galleries and museums and had your work included in important collections. Is there a house you would like to exhibit in or a collection you would like to be part of with your work?

M.s. No. Just because you’re part of a collection doesn’t mean that you’ll be exhibited. Either my ambition is over or pessimism has finally caught up with me. For me, a work of art is a destination where everything comes together. The study, the research, the creation, the critics, journalists and collectors. The work is often also an entry ticket into a social context. Access or belonging to a society. That of collectors, art lovers, intellectuals, etc. That doesn’t play a big role for me. The creation of my paintings is a very lengthy process. There might not be another painter who can produce as slowly as I do. We do four paintings a year, each a completely new beginning in its own right. The recognition happens on a technical level and is probably not comprehensible to many viewers on the surface.

M. Ë In your art, where you use different media, you deal with perception and the body. What fascinates you about this subject area?

M.s. Nothing at all. It fascinated me because we all perceive and get to know the world through our bodies. Our bodies are the key to understanding the world. The portraits that I created with prostheses or fabric over my head were supposed to show us something that we don’t know from experience and that we can’t understand. But since we all had to wear masks, I stopped doing that because it’s just too close to home now. Reality has caught up with my work. Eight years ago I made war pictures, but unfortunately, reality caught up with that too. And I developed a performance for Wiener Festwochen, a dance of death—that project was overtaken by the pandemic. That’s a very unpleasant development.

M. Ë In spagyric medicine (from the Greek spao to extract, to separate and ageiro to unite, to bring together)—a method of drug preparation dating back to pre-Christian times—the separation and reuniting of a drug’s active principles are used to increase its effectiveness. In the Feldenkrais method, movement sequences are taken apart and reassembled. This is how new movement patterns are learned. That reminds me a lot of your work. Is the increase in effectiveness or learning something new also your intention?

M.s. Yes, definitely. When designing exhibitions (MS designs exhibitions for the Heidi Horten Collection in Vienna, among others), this is central for me. We can learn to see through our bodies. I am interested in breaking conventions and thereby changing the experience, incorporating mistakes to break with the familiar.

M. Ë You often switch between media and production types. Do you start with a theme and then decide how you want to present it or have you ever wanted to do a performance and then find a theme for it retroactively?

M.s. It always starts with an occasion. An invitation and a problem. What actually interests me is the solution to problems. For example, limited space, budget restrictions or too few employees. If none of these problems exist, then I look for one and bring it to the client so that something interesting can emerge.

M. Ë You primarily live and work in Vienna and New York. What qualities do you appreciate most about each of these cities? And where do you see their most glaring differences?

M.s. Vienna is decidedly more pleasant and balanced in terms of social life. From the 70s to the late 90s, New York was a magnet for weird people from all over the world. Vienna didn’t have that. New York is still more international and diverse than Vienna. Of course, there are still 70 to 80-year-olds in New York who are weird. The range of lifestyles is greater than in Vienna as well. But New York is now so expensive that it’s unreasonable for young or old people. It’s only feasible to be there and live in the city if you have a lot of money. There are people in Vienna who have the same profession as me and who I don’t know. There is an unknown remnant. There is the opportunity to dive in and discover new things.

M. Ë What do you miss when you’re in New York and vice versa?

M.s. Less the respective cities and more the roles I inhabit there. We play different roles in different contexts. When I’m with my parents in Salzburg, I’m still a child. I also miss that in Vienna sometimes.

M. Ë Where are you headed in your artistic journey?

M.s. For me, my students are an opportunity to spy on the future. They offer me the opportunity to exchange ideas. They are the counterpart I need to try out ideas by expressing them. I can’t do that alone at home on the computer. I can see that collecting is no longer an issue for the younger generation. They grow up with streaming music and movies. You don’t have to own anything anymore. We used to collect things. Stamps, stickers, CDs, books. That’s how collecting started—and how we formed connections to material things. Today, no one really collects anything. I see something like positive and negative materialism. Positive, where it creates a connection to things, materials, processing methods, etc. Negative where it leads to superficial abundance. Students of mine get several million clicks on their social media posts. An audience that they will never reach with their art alone. They create their own audience. Communication has become an essential part of working as an artist.