Thomas Bayrle

Taking seriality and dimensionality as formal concerns, and Pop ephemera as a conceptual interest, the idiosyncratic work of German artist Thomas Bayrle cleverly married both Op and Pop Art movements to great effect. Bayrle was an early adopter of computer-aided art production, using digital technologies to create complicated 3D-looking figures with pinched or expanded tiles of the same iconic images of shoes, apples, nude men and women, or corporate logos. Some of his designs were used as for fabric patterns, others have been used as illustrations. Bayrle’s 1970 silkscreen print Die Christel von der Post depicts the lead actress in a movie of the same name, rendering her lips, brow, hairstyle, and other details with exceptional detail, all out of the repeated pictogram of a yellow rotary phone. Bayrle’s cheeky, intricate work celebrates art as a craft, commercial cultural objects as part of the aesthetic landscape, and challenges viewers to look more deeply and carefully at hidden visions embedded in many pictures. 

Baryle has exhibited internationally since the 1960s at institutions including the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, United Kingdom, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Missouri, Musée d’art Monderne et Contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland, Museu d’Art Contemporary de Barcelona, Spain, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Center for Contemporary Art Kitakyushu, Japan, New Museum, New York, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California, among many others. He was commissioned to create a billboard for the Highline in New York City in 2012. The artist has also regularly participated in international surveys of art including dOCUMENT 3 (1964), 6 (1977), and 13 (2012), Kassel, the 53rd and 50th Venice Biennale (2009, 2001), the Biennale of Sydney (2008), and the Brussels Biennial (2008), among others. He was awarded the Arnold Bode Prize in 2012.