Martin Schnur's solo exhibition "Imagina" shows new works by the artist. Works that show mirror elements, unfinished landscapes and sleeping male figures under nets.
Martin Schnur's already familiar palette is given a new, contemporary makeover. The mirrors are no longer smashed and scattered on the floor. The mirrored person is thus not broken down into various individual parts, but their figure is repeated many times in the picture, cut and thrown back again, into the room, which has the light-absorbing carpet as a counter-surface, or into the recognisable landscape, with its calm reflection of water, whose river mouth disappears into a sprawling landscape of trees.
The play with light, the interest in the refraction of what is depicted, the clear, angular cut that the element of the reflective glass surface combines, fascinates Schnur anew in this series. There are also works on display that reveal no reflection whatsoever. These are mostly men lying under a canopy of leaves which, on closer inspection, appears almost damp, as if criss-crossed by cobwebs. Here, the fauna appears enlarged, oversized and juxtaposed with the person. The traditional picture-in-picture theme in Martin Schnur's work is not only convincing due to the different pictorial elements, but also due to the confusing, but at the same time fascinating, proportions of the different representations.
Open landscape pictures are shown as a completely new series. Schnur himself calls them "Non finito". The canvas remains open, the painted image protrudes, with hard edges, into the unpainted surface to create a free natural landscape. The precisely depicted background, the painterly treatment of the foreground and the original colour of the canvas blend to create a self-contained work. In these works, Martin Schnur succeeds - as in his copper paintings - in allowing the brush to speak as a free tool. The speed, the dynamism with which Schnur seems to "drive" across the canvas is immediately apparent and reveals an almost new, free Martin Schnur.
"I blot, I start, often I take the palette and press it on and then I become freehand," says Schnur in the interview that was created for the exhibition catalogue. In addition to this interview, the "Imagina" catalogue also includes an article by Margit Zuckriegl, in which the art historian explores the "labyrinthine search movements" in Schnur's work.
