Elmar Trenkwalder – Gmundner Keramik

The Austrian artist has been impressing viewers for more than three decades with a body of work that is fascinatingly ambiguous in terms of content and visuals. In their fantastic, exuberant richness of detail, his monumental ceramic sculptures are reminiscent of magnificent Baroque and Rococo architecture, but also of Asian forms.

It is above all his radical approach that gives Trenkwalder a unique position in the international art scene. Coming from painting, he turned to ceramics as a means of artistic expression as early as the mid-1980s. By developing a construction method that is more architectural than ceramic, he increasingly created those opulent, expansive sculptures that only experience static boundaries through the virtuoso mastery of the material.

The exhibition provides an overview of the work through to new works produced especially for the exhibition.

Elmar Trenkwalder (*1959) lives in Innsbruck. He studied under Max Weiler and Arnulf Rainer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and achieved international recognition early on, including “Aperto 90” Venice Biennale by Harald Seemann (1990), “Austria im Rosennetz” MAK Vienna and “Wunderkammer Österreich” Kunsthaus Zurich (1996), Lyon Biennale (1997), Musée de Louvre Paris (2005)