Elmar Trenkwalder

Anyone confronted for the first time with the art of Elmar Trenkwalder, whether with his drawings, his early paintings or the clay sculptures of recent years, will not soon cease to marvel. Elmar Trenkwalder’s anthropomorphic theatre of architecture assembles an œuvre entirely unique of its kind. Resident in Cologne in the mid-1980s, the artist – born in 1959 and living today in Innsbruck – at first enjoyed smaller successes with drawings and pictures of a symbolist air, in which frames made of carpet, and then of clay, shift the pictorial content into the periphery and extend it. The first works in coloured glazed clay stand out for their unique physical expression of the male body, which Elmar Trenkwalder – very much within a certain Austrian tradition of the transgression of sexual boundaries – sees, in its function of ejaculation and excretion, as forming an impossible unity with the female body as part of an ideal whole. Individual figurative representations were soon followed by multi-part architectural ensemble sculptures which, however, propagate no new Kamasutra but rather call to mind Hindu temples or Gothic and Romanesque cathedrals as well as Baroque façades. Here, too, diversely shaped fragments of bodies and genitals serve as a sensual charge, even though the architectures first direct the gaze towards the whole, towards its layout, and only later towards the detail, and the figurations are strictly schematised and not executed with precision in detail. “Sweet and sour” is what Peter Weiermair once called this approach, which he sees in the particular tension of transformation between visual programme and material – a material that, above all through its tradition and its aura of craftsmanship, is assigned to “decoration.” On the occasion of a European collaboration comprising several venues, this volume now presents at length, for the first time, a complete overview of Elmar Trenkwalder’s work.

Exhibitions:
Kunstmuseum Thurgau, Kartause Ittingen, 1/4 – 10/7/2012
Kunsthalle Krems, 15/7 – 14/10/2012
Gerhard Marcks Haus, Bremen, 28/10/2012 – 17/2/2013
MUba Eugène Leroy Tourcoing, 17/4 – 24/11/2014