Thomas Bayrle
Madonna City Madonna Golden Nugget Club
Series and reproduction in Thomas Bayrle’s work serve as markers of overproduction and the gradual erasure of a qualitative appreciation of our environment. It reflects a contemporary movement mirroring the idea of progress developed in the West since the 18th century. Bayrle traces the age of the machine back to the 13th century, showcasing car engines with a certain admiration, comparing their mechanics to Gothic cathedrals, and evoking the rhythmic humming of scattered monks in medieval Europe.
For Anthropocène Monument, Thomas Bayrle presents a series where religious imagery intertwines with symbols of the mechanization of the world. In the four screen prints submitted by the artist for the project, the drapery of a Gothic Madonna transforms into highways.
BIO
Thomas Bayrle was born in Berlin in 1937 and now lives and works in Frankfurt. He was a permanent lecturer at the Städelschule in Frankfurt from 1975 to 2002. His work has been shown in some of the world’s most important exhibitions, such as documenta 3, 6, and 13 in Kassel, Germany (1964, 1977, 2012), and the 50th and 53rd Venice Biennales (2003, 2009). He has held major solo exhibitions at MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art, Vienna (2017); Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2016); Lenbachhaus, Munich (2016), and has received numerous awards and prizes, including the Cologne Art Prize (2000) and the Prix Arts Electronica, Linz (1995). Bayrle is best known for his ‘super-forms’, large images composed of iterations of smaller cell-like images. Humorous, satirical, and often political, his paintings, sculptures, and digital images are commentaries on the systems of control and domination in a rapidly globalizing economy, via allegorical references to traffic patterns, mass production, and the generic designs of popular goods such as wrappers and wallpaper.
Relevant Themes: extraction, transport, infrastructure
Category: Events