The Romanian-German artist Miron Schmückle is a singular position within contemporary art. Growing up in Romania under Nicolae Ceaușescu, he dreamed of other worlds that seemed forever inaccessible due to the Iron Curtain. From the beginning, Schmückle’s uniquely coherent pictorial cosmos has been linked to the idea of primeval forests and jungles, oscillating between hyperrealism and undisguised escapism, precise observation of nature and exuberant imagination. His almost scientific approach belies the fact that his complex creations have not sprung from nature but from imagination. Schmückle’s fascinating hybrid creatures intertwine notions of scent and poison, beauty and transience, anatomy and sexuality to create an oeuvre between truth and invention that is both timeless and ostensibly fallen out of time. This monograph comprises works from the past 15 years and gives insights into the artist’s concepts and technique through an in-depth interview with art scholar and journalist Simon Elson.

MIRON SCHMÜCKLE (*1966 Sibiu, Romania) emigrated to Germany in 1988 and studied from 1991–96 at the Muthesius University of Fine Arts and Design in Kiel in Renate Anger’s class for experimental painting, and at the HFBK Hamburg in the class for performance with Marina Abramović in 1994. He moved into his first studio in Hamburg in 1997. Since 2008, he has lived and worked in Berlin. He received his doctorate in 2016, with a study on Joris Hoefnagel’s 16th century cabinet miniatures..