Elmar Trenkwalder

Ornament and obsession

Anyone confronted with Elmar Trenkwalder's art for the first time, whether with his drawings, early paintings or the clay sculptures from recent years, will not soon cease to be amazed. Elmar Trenkwalder's anthropomorphic architectural theatre brings together a completely unique body of work of this kind. Based in Cologne in the mid-1980s, the artist, who was born in 1959 and now lives in Innsbruck, initially enjoyed minor success with symbolist drawings and paintings in which frames made of carpet, but then of clay, shift and expand the pictorial content into the periphery. His first works in coloured glazed clay stand out for their unique physical expression of the male body, which Elmar Trenkwalder sees as forming an impossible unity with the female body in a certain Austrian tradition of the transgression of sexual boundaries in its function of ejaculation and excretion as part of an ideal whole.
Individual figurative representations are soon followed by multi-part architectural ensemble sculptures, which, however, do not propagate a new Kamasutra, but are more reminiscent of Hindu temples or Gothic and Romanesque cathedrals as well as Baroque façades. But here too, the variously shaped body and genital fragments act as a sensual charge, although the architecture initially draws the eye to the whole, its layout, and only later to the detail, the figurations are strictly schematised and not precisely executed in detail. Peter Weiermair once called this approach to his work "sweet and sour", which he sees in the particular transformational tension between visual programme and material, which is attributed to "decoration" in particular due to its tradition and aura of craftsmanship.
For the first time, this volume now presents a comprehensive overview of Elmar Trenkwalder's work on the occasion of a European co-operation spanning several stations.

Exhibitions:
Thurgau Art Museum, Ittingen Charterhouse, 1/4 - 10/7/2012
Kunsthalle Krems, 15/7 - 14/10/2012
Gerhard Marcks House, Bremen, 28/10/2012 - 17/2/2013
MUba Eugène Leroy Tourcoing, 17/4 - 24/11/2014