MARTIN SCHNUR "PLACING SHADOWS"

Galerie Jahn in Landshut is presenting the Austrian artist Martin Schnur with his spectacular and masterful oil paintings for the second time.
The exhibition, entitled "Placing Shadows", shows his painting from the perspective of realistic, photorealistic and hyperrealistic contemporary painting positions.

The inflation of visual media and omnipresence, fast pace, availability and distribution of photos in social media have significantly changed the relationship with imagery. The portrait is increasingly becoming a random snapshot compared to the complexity and staging of earlier images. The moment is simply captured and instantly shared on Instagram or Facebook. Martin Schnur stands in stark contrast to this. His pictures are composed and the masterly finesse behind them is not only recognisable in the technique but also in the depicted hyperrealism that exclusively distinguishes his pictures. An essential part of Schnur's work is the integration and connection of different levels of images and reality, in which he encourages the viewer to tap into their own ideas and fantasies. He constructs complex, surreally exaggerated visual space contexts that do not happen in reality and engage the viewer. Feelings and moods emerge, which are in turn compared with the pictures by the viewer.

Galerie Jahn is showing two different series of works in the "Placing Shadows" exhibition: on the one hand, images of people in a seemingly photorealistic ambience and, on the other, landscapes that relate the concept of landscape in hyperrealism to a concrete abstraction.

Martin Schnur graduated from the Kunstgewerbeschule Graz from 1982 to 1985 and then from the master class for sculpture with Joannis Avramidis at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna from 1985 to 1990.
Today, he is one of the most important representatives of pictorial and hyperrealistic painting in Austria and his works are an important element of renowned institutional museum and private art collections. Martin Schnur lives and works in Vienna.

Exhibition opening: Wednesday, 22 May 2019, 7.30 p.m.
Exhibition runs from 22 May to 5 July 2019