Markus Schinwald, born in 1973 in Salzburg, Austria, lives and works in Vienna and Los Angeles. He studied at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Linz and at Humboldt University in Berlin. He has had numerous solo shows, including at the Kunsthaus Bregenz (2009), Műcsarnok Kunsthalle Budapest (2009), Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst (2008), Augarten Contemporary, Vienna (2007), Aspen Art Museum (2006) and the Frankfurter Kunstverein (2004). His works are to be found in numerous international collections, including at Tate Modern, London, Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, Kunsthaus Zürich and the MUMOK — Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna.

Markus Schinwald engages in his work with the human body and the way it is embedded in the cultural context as well as a psychological analysis of the space that surrounds it. The dynamics of the individual and the collective, which are frequently dominated by constraints and anxiety, are expressed in the various media with which Schinwald works in the form of alienation, fragmentation and rifts. He explores the normal and its perception on the basis of films, sculptures, the design of clothes or the reworking of old paintings and lithographic prints where the subjects are manipulated and altered to open up new levels of reality and experience. The aestheticised images stand in contrast to the gaps that are evoked and the shifts in narrative while also being a product of the intermingling of reality, experience and perception.