Martin Wöhrl

Martin Wöhrl (born 1974 in Munich) lives and works in Munich. He studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, as well as at Edinburgh College of Art and the Glasgow School of Art. As a master student of Professor James Reineking, he developed an independent artistic approach early on. Numerous awards—including the Lothar Fischer Prize, the Villa Concordia Scholarship, and the Bavarian State Advancement Award—recognize his ongoing engagement with sculpture within a broader field.

Wöhrl's work moves between object, spatial intervention, and conceptual arrangement. He is interested in material as a carrier of memory and meaning—both found objects and deliberately reduced ones. Everyday forms, architectural fragments, or cultural remnants are transformed into new contexts. This results in precisely placed situations that shift perception and expectation without resorting to gesture or pathos.

His works have been exhibited in museums, art associations, and galleries both in Germany and abroad, including the Museum Villa Stuck, the Museum für Konkrete Kunst Ingolstadt, the Kunsthalle Krems, as well as in New York, Vienna, and Berlin. Wöhrl's practice is characterized by a clear formal language that combines conceptual rigor with a quiet presence.

Supplied by Galerie Knust Kunz

Martin Wöhrl

Q&A with the artists:

The exhibition ARTIFICIAL? Traces of the Present brings together works that question our perception. Reality appears not as a given, but as something that is constantly being appropriated. ARTIFICIAL? questions whether what we see and experience is not always already made, constructed, and mediated.

1) How does your work engage with reality and its construction, and what “traces of the present” become visible in it?

The door of an old farmhouse, post-war cobblestones, the ornamentation of an Art Nouveau villa – these are the kinds of things that inspire me, and from them I create works according to my concept of art, which is shaped by Minimal Art and Arte Povera. Traditional craftsmanship and architecture from my Bavarian homeland are receiving increasing attention, and I appreciate the contrast between Baroque references and the clear, reduced formal language of my sculptures and reliefs.

2) How does your work develop from the initial idea to completion, and what role does your presentation style play in this process?

An idea usually arises from everyday observations.Pavesi, actually surveying signals in the Austrian mountains, or metalworkIt's all okI discovered this quote from an old tourism advertisement from the Pinzgau region while driving through the Alps. In my studio, I then recreate it from memory, altering the material, size, and context according to my own vision during the execution process. The result is something new.