Markus ProschekTrue Lies

For the artist Markus Proschek (*1981), born in Austria and living in Berlin, subliminally Nazi aesthetics or totalitarian architectures repeatedly present artistic challenges. The bronze sculpture of the “Schwimmerin” (2006), painted in oils, is one such case. In a certain sense it invokes the pictorial tradition of Psyche or of Narcissus, yet in visual terms it oscillates, as a Breker-style beauty, between Nazi bombast and Bauhaus coolness. Proschek’s highly subtle works trace this ambivalent functional relationship, which exists between ideological appropriation and works of art that remain open to manipulations of meaning. The same is true of his oil painting “Die Merz-Gefallenen” (2007), whose ironic, fictitious scenario is set in the Munich Haus der Kunst, with a sculpture after Caspar David Friedrich’s famous painting “Das Eismeer” in the foreground and elements from Kurt Schwitters’ “Merz-Bau” piling up in the adjoining room. In parodic fashion, the canonical is thus confronted with the possibility of its own rejection when it is brought into contact with the insubordinate – with the Nazi aesthetic of the exhibition temple. That the culture and art of modernism do not constitute a stable currency was already underlined by Jacques Derrida when he observed that meaning arises solely from the relation between things, which at the same time renders obsolete the notion that there is such a thing as an original, true meaning. Markus Proschek comments: “For me, the perspectives directed at this subject were a little unsatisfying. Most contemporary works of art dealing with these themes always seemed to me either very moralistic, superficial or, worse still, boring.”

Exhibition:
Kunstraum Innsbruck, 21/4 – 8/7/2017