Markus Proschek: True Lies

Babylon's House of Art

For the Austrian-born, Berlin-based artist Markus Proschek (*1981), subliminally Nazi aesthetics or totalitarian architecture always present artistic challenges. The oil-painted bronze sculpture of the "Swimmer" (2006) is one such case. To a certain extent, it invokes the pictorial tradition of Psyche or Narcissus, but in terms of visual aesthetics it oscillates as a Breker beauty between Nazi bulge and Bauhaus coolness. Proschek's highly subtle works explore this ambivalent functional relationship between ideological appropriation and works of art that are open to manipulation. This includes his oil painting "Die Merz-Gefallenen" (2007), whose ironic, fictitious scene is set in Munich's Haus der Kunst, with a sculpture based on Caspar David Friedrich's famous painting "Das Eismeer" (The Sea of Ice) in the foreground and elements from Kurt Schwitters' "Merz-Bau" piled up in the neighbouring room. The canonical is thus parodistically confronted with the possibility of its rejection when it is brought into contact with the unruly - with the Nazi aesthetics of the exhibition temple. Jacques Derrida already emphasised the fact that culture and art in modernism do not form a stable currency by stating that meaning is only derived from the relationship between things, which also makes the idea that there is such a thing as an original, true meaning obsolete. Markus Proschek says: "For me, the perspectives on the subject were a little unsatisfactory. Most contemporary artworks dealing with these themes always seemed to me to be either very moralistic, superficial or, even worse, boring."

Exhibition:
Art space Innsbruck, 21/4 - 8/7/2017