Martin Schnur

Biography

Martin Schnur, born in Vorau in 1964, attended the Kunstgewerbeschule in Graz from 1982 to 1985 and from 1985 to 1990, the master class for sculpture taught by Joannis Avramidis at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. It was a job as an assistant for a Sol LeWitt exhibition in the Vienna Secession in 1988, where he helped to create a monumental "Wall Drawing", that led him to a career in painting.
He has successfully participated in numerous exhibitions at home and abroad. His paintings are included in the collections of the Albertina and the Belvedere in Vienna, in the Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, in the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg, in the Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum in Innsbruck, in the Benediktinerstift Admont and the Neue Galerie in Graz, in the Angerlehner Collection, the Strabag Art Collection, in the Museum Liaunig in Neuhaus, the Brandenberg Collection, United States and the Reznikov Collection in Moscow.

As a self-taught painter, he incorporates sculptural qualities into his pictures, such as the statuesque placement of his figures and their arrangement in different spatial systems. Sometimes photographic templates serve as a starting point, which form the basis for the painting in a collage-like composition. But images and situations stored in memory, retrieved from a visual memory, also find their way into his paintings. Martin Schnur has developed a “picture-in-picture-procedure” that is typical for him and consists of different levels of space and reality.