ABOUT THE WORK
Participation at the Exhibition ARCHITECTURE | LANDSCAPE (2012)

The work of Markus Guschelbauer hinges upon the landscape as an archaic subject. As he learned during his childhood on a farm, for his work he goes out into nature and build upon it. Sometimes it´s a lonely task – going into nature, looking, planning, building. Forest, water, stones, pieces of sod are hung, replanted, defamiliarized. The materials he uses for his rearrangements are distant from nature, usually materials like draperies, mirrors, ropes or tarpaulins from the hardware store. Unlike land art, he is not primarly interested in the process of nature`s effect on the artwork. His interventions are done for the photograph, for the cameara with its fixed standpoint, set from the very start, an thus have fulfilled their task. Yet the act of building is an important part of this artistic project. A performance in which the artist, jumping from stone to stone, climbing, erecting scaffolds, using trees as columns fixes the image by stretching, placing, hanging tarpaulins or other building materials, and in the process gets caught up in an intuitive flow. In his installation he cuts and covers nature. In his most recent work plastic nature nature is almost entirely eliminated. The bare spruce trunks have the function of columns, they have been robbed optically of both roots and upper branches. The ground wafts in soft mounds of folds: the impression of a wonderland is created, just an inkling of the outside world shimmers greenishly through the spatial limits.

In Komposition in Rot, Blau, Gelb, Mint und Lachs the artist makes nature a component of art history. In so doing, trees in the snow become the “construction” of a “Mondrian”. Or he builds a kind of glashouse in the middle of the wood – to see inside and watch from inside out but always with a hidden barrier in between to define the nearly insurmountable ambivalence of human being and his nature.

ABOUT THE ARTIST