Markus Huemer works both in the media of painting and drawing, as well as produces interactive installations and environments, and computer animations. In doing so, he investigates the suitability of the digital media for art on the basis of his experience in the classical ones, bearing in mind art and media history, and questioning at the same time the assumed brilliance of artists by making a sarcastic parody of himself.
Huemer develops his series of works using various formats in order to explore problems of reality, the construction of various realities and their perception. Interested in the questions of presentation and representation, he creates parallel words and observes how they communicate using extremely pared-down projections, installations and products, which seem to be as flat as cut-outs, with colours that appear reduced to a minimum in order to spread what appears to be something recognisable, but at the same time they call attention to the deception of visual perception. Simulating the depth of focus in black, grey and white we are whisked away to a silent landscape of ideas, which destroys our fake perception, coldly and without narrative.
The fundamental principle of his work is the investigation of language as a starting point of his deliberations on perception, communication and understanding, and as a play of language. In the titles of the artworks he uses irony as a way of making statements about paradoxes: we look for a message or some form of communication, which in fact does not exist.
Markus Huemer was born in 1968 in Linz, where he studied painting and then pursued his studies at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. He was appointed a fellow at the Kunsthochschule für Medien in Cologne. The scholarship granted by the ZKM, Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, in Karlsruhe gave him the opportunity to develop a deep interest in media art. In addition to this, he studied art history, philosophy and Latin philology. After teaching at Goethe University in Frankfurt, he became a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where he worked until 2015.
Huemer’s works have been exhibited at renowned international museums and institutions such as the Museum Moderner Kunst Vienna, Albertina, Saarlandmuseum, Kunsthaus Baselland, DOX Prague, Museum MARTA Herford or Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin and can be found in several public and private collections. Since 2000 Huemer has lived and worked in Berlin.
