Miron Schmückle
Flesh for Fantasy

The Romanian-German artist Miron Schmückle (b. 1966, Sibiu) is a very unique protagonist of contemporary art. Growing up in Romania under Nicolae Ceausescu, as a child, the artist had dreamed of other worlds which seemed forever inaccessible due to the Iron Curtain. His early engagement with art history on the one hand and with flora and fauna of distant countries on the other resulted in a uniquely coherent artistic oeuvre. From the beginning, Schmückle’s pictorial cosmos was linked to the idea of the primaeval forest and jungle, oscillating between finely painted hyperrealism and undisguised escapism, precise observation of nature and exuberant imagination. The almost scientific, botanical approach of his plant depictions belies the fact that his complex creations have not sprung from nature but rather from his imagination. Schmückle’s fascinating hybrid creatures from the plant and animal kingdoms amalgamate scent and poison, beauty and transience, anatomy and sexuality into an oeuvre between truth and invention, life and death—a life’s work that is both timeless and ostensibly fallen out of time.

Curator 
Dr Philipp Demandt (Director, Städel Museum)