ASPEN, CO.- The Aspen Art Museum presents the exhibit Markus Schinwald through January 28, 2007. There is a theatricality at the heart of Austrian artist Markus Schinwald’s work: his 35mm films read as a series of elegantly staged dramas in which actors and dancers with bizarre prostheses and apparent movement disorders operate according to an inscrutable internal logic. His prints and paintings combine original 19th century portraiture manipulated seamlessly to include similar contraptions, creating for the viewer a sense of the subject’s psychological state manifested physically.

Schinwald’s investigations of human interaction exploit the dialogue between the body and its surroundings. Not only do the characters in his films seem to labor under their various constraining devices, but even the inanimate components of the scene’s architecture and furniture seem to become psychically charged, permeating the work with a kind of awkward elegance.

Schinwald’s exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum will be his first one-person museum exhibition in the United States.

Markus Schinwald has had one-person exhibitions at Argos, Brussels; the Frankfurter Kunstverein; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and the Kunstverein Freiburg. His work has also been included in numerous international group exhibitions, including the 2005 Prague Biennale, the 45th Venice Biennale, and the 1998 Berlin Biennale.