guest of honour

Born in 1959 in Weißenbach am Lech, Elmar Trenkwalder now lives and works in Innsbruck, Austria. Trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna under Max Weiler and Arnulf Rainer (1978–1982), he developed from the outset an impressive, exuberant, and fantastical artistic practice, rich in detail and imbued with a fascination for visual ambiguity.

For more than forty years, Trenkwalder has been creating monumental and opulent sculptures whose ornamental richness recalls Baroque and Rococo architecture, while also evoking certain Asian forms. His ceramic sculptures demonstrate outstanding technical mastery.

The artist pushes the limits of ceramics, elevating it to the status of a true architectural material, and revealing a body of work in which technical virtuosity is combined with unprecedented formal power.

From the 1990s onwards, Trenkwalder established himself on the international scene. In 1990, he took part in Aperto 90at the Venice Biennale, curated by Harald Szeemann, and in 1997 he was invited to the Lyon Biennale. This was followed by notable exhibitions such as Austria im Rosennetz at the MAK in Vienna and Wunderkammer Österreich at the Kunsthaus Zürich (1996), as well as Contrepoint at the Louvre Museum (2005). In 2008, La Maison Rouge in Paris devoted an exhibition to him and Augustin Lesage, Les inspirés, confirming his major role in the dialogue between contemporary art and visionary heritage.

Trenkwalder’s work has been the subject of numerous major solo exhibitions, including those at the Salzburger Rupertinum (2001), Kunsthalle Krems and Gerhard-Marcks-Haus in Bremen (2012), MUDAM Luxembourg (2013), MUba Eugène Leroy in Tourcoing (2014), Kunstraum Dornbirn and the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig (2018), and the Kunstmuseum Olten (2019). More recently, his monumental sculptures have been exhibited at the Beelden aan Zee Museum in The Hague (2023), the Schlossmuseum in Linz, and the Gmundner Keramik Manufaktur (2025).

Over the course of his career, Elmar Trenkwalder has received several awards, including the City of Vienna Prize (1991), the Anton Faistauer Prize for Painting (1993), the Salzburg State Prize for Ceramics (2004), and the Tyrol State Prize for Contemporary Art (2015).

Today, Elmar Trenkwalder is recognised as one of the leading figures in contemporary European sculpture. His work, both visionary and deeply rooted in art history, forges a unique connection between ornament, architecture, and spirituality.

"A work of art is created through a process that is largely internalised and results from a vision. At the beginning of a project, there may also be an idea, stimuli from other works of art or personal experiences that trigger this idea, but ultimately, when you simply follow an idea, it usually only produces something that already exists.

What is decisive is the creative process from which the work can unfold beyond the idea or representation we have of it. I often start with an abstract shape, a square, a triangle or a circle, in other words a shape that is so common that it forces me, so to speak, to explore the possibilities it holds.

The opulent structures that emerge often reveal almost nothing of the abstraction on which they are based... In the beginning, I need empty, meditative space in order to arrive at the complexity where my most personal expression is, in a sense, at home. "

Excerpt from "Elmar Trenkwalder in conversation with Herta Pümpel" in the exhibition catalogue Elmar Trenkwalder "Engel über Licht und Schatten, 2018 Dornbirn ".