Cardi Black Box is proud to announce Produzione Bayrle, a spectacular and multi-faceted exhibition by German artist Thomas Bayrle. The show will open to the public on October 30th and continue until the 23rd of December 2009.

Born in Berlin in 1937, Thomas Bayrle lives and works in Frankfurt am Mein. Seminal figure in Germany, together with artists like Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter, Bayrle is regarded the pioneer of German Pop, albeit his ideological approach to the iconography of mass consumerism is considerably different. The artists' artist, as he's often defined because of his fundamental role of teacher and mentor at Frankfurt’s Staedelschule, Bayrle has created since the 1960s a substantial and coherent body of works shaped also by his experimentations with music, design, graphic, publishing and political activism.

The exhibition project conceived by Bayrle for Cardi Black Box - the gallery’s fifth event since its inauguration - is a re-interpretation of a show that the artist presented at Galleria Apollinaire in Milan in 1968. Back - after more then fourty years - to the city that very early in his career hosted the key exhibition for the development of his artistic practice, Bayrle 'makes history' through history by presenting a new edition of the impressive original project.

Curated by Sarah Cosulich Canarutto, the exhibition is a large scale installation which unites Bayrle’s multi-faceted reflections on the relationship between consumerism and mass, individualism and collectivity, perception and representation.
A psychedelic arrangement of wallpapers, with the artist’s legendary Pop-like patterns, will completely cover the gallery spaces. They will represent the background, like in the original exhibition project, for some imposing silkscreens of the late 60s, explosions of daily objects transformed into mass icons.

Completing the installation of the ground floor and focal point of the exhibition, there will be a 'production' of screenprinted raincoats with his Pop-like patterns. This collection, realized by the artist specifically on this occasion, represents a contemporary version of his 'sartorial production' of 1968. The colourful coats will be on sale at the gallery as an artist's limited edition and a more accessible special edition, in the future to be purchased also in some fashion shops. Also this second series of raincoats responds to the artist's wish to contribute with his work to a wider, and more 'democratic' distribution of art and, paradoxically, to dress the individual of his same forms and inner contradictions. Themes such as repetition and serial production, and the relationship between a single element and its accumulation, represent key features of the work of Thomas Bayrle, who had himself worked in textile and printing factories  and experienced the chain-like rhythm of the post-industrial era.

To enrich the entirety of the exhibition project, on the first floor of the gallery there will be a group of works – silkscreens, paintings, collages and mixed media compositions – shown in Italy for the first time, exploring Bayrle's artistic career from the 60s until today and offering a unique analysis of the complexity and depth of his vision.

The nature of this comprehensive exhibition of museum-like scope will offer a unique and unexpected experience to the visitor, by projecting him/her into a unicum in which the artwork permeates space, infiltrating the most surprising creases of the everyday.

THOMAS BAYRLE – THE ARTIST

The artists’ artist – as he is often called – Thomas Bayrle is a historic figure who only recently has gained the extraordinary international acclaim that his work deserves. Regarded as one of the pioneers of the German Pop movement, and a seminal figure in Germany together with artists like Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter, Bayrle’s engaging body of work has often been 'overshadowed' by his equally influential contribution as teacher at the famous Staedelschule in Frankfurt. While working as professor and mentor to his students – among them important artists such as, for instance, Tobias Rehberger, Tomas Saraceno, Thomas Zipp and Sergej Jensen – Bayrle has experimented with music, design, graphics, publishing and political activism, developing his practice throughout the years into an extremely rich and coherent body of work.

Analysed at a deeper level, Bayrle’s works go far beyond Pop Art. Despite recognisable links with the iconography of mass consumerism typical of the movement, Bayrle has always been subverting its paradigms. He has appropriated the visual syntax typical of Pop– with its imagery rich of brightly coloured, desirable, mass produced objects – yet handled the images in a different, spatially and architectonically charged way, with a politically and socially engaged approach. Bayrle creates a visual language which turns everyday objects into mass icons, questioning the way through which these very icons are formed.

PRODUZIONE BAYRLE – THE PROJECT AT CARDI BLACK BOX

Deciding to replicate the Milan 1968 exhibition in the very same city in 2009 is a very strong and important statement. The show at Galleria Apollinaire was not only key for the development of Thomas Bayrle's work but it is proof of the revolutionary and ground-breaking character of his work. This exhibition is as significant and contemporary today as it was avant garde in 1968. It is a statement that a radical approach to art does not age with time but rather grows with it.

Bayrle deconstructs both the structure and meaning of everyday objects to then multiply them infinitely and unveil their paradoxes. The consumerist products as well as the achievements of civilization are turned into experiments by repetition, by the very same process which defines their own existence. Repetition is the focus of Produzione Bayrle, not only in the psychedelic wallpapers, but also and even more in the series of raincoats screenprinted with Pop-like patterns that will be on sale at the gallery as well as in external circuits.

The idea is that visitors can not only look at the work but wear it as well. With this kind of undertaking which - and it needs to be underlined - was firstly carried out in 1968, Bayrle is not aiming to extend e artwork challenges: the individual. According to Bayrle, repetition simulates the relationship between individual and group, thus revealing the contradictions of society. To him, mass is the result of the combination of parts, cells, units that are components but that go back to being themselves a “whole”. They are matched and interwoven into rhythmical  structures, where the single elements enjoy the same importance as the whole. If the pattern created by repetition is the result of a constant shift between the single element and its accumulation, wearing one of Bayrle's dresses means turning into a physical metaphor of the relationship between individuality and mass. This way, the visitors become themselves 'superforms', a term Bayrle coined to express objects and things constituted by the assembly of their very atoms. Besides this new clothing line, Bayrle’s highly hallucinatory compositions will extend throughout the gallery space in different forms: wallpapers covering the entire surface of the gallery, a monumental sculpture dress, as well as other variations on the theme. These different modes in which the notion of repetition is developed throughout the gallery challenge man within history, politics and the social sphere, in order to bring the attention back to man as individual.

THOMAS BAYRLE’S WORK – FROM THE 60’s TO THE PRESENT

Analysing some of Bayrle’s works from the past is helpful in order to understand the complexity of his approach and the width and bearing of his iconography. Society is itself a composite fabric, of which Bayrle does not target only consumerism, but also the mercification of deeper and more personal spheres such as sex or religion.
The series Feuer im Weizen, dated 1970, is in fact a great example of the explicit, almost advertising-like silkscreens that Bayrle produced in response to the sexual liberation of the Sixties and Seventies. A scene of oral intercourse and legions of ladies' legs on high heels are repeated as a pattern, to form a pair of spread legs with visible female genitalia.
In the video Autobahnkreuz, Motorway Junction (2006), a crucified Christ is constituted by a series of images of a busy motorway: the video takes the spectator along an hypnotic journey into the paradoxes of iconography. Motorways become a metaphor for high speed circulation of goods and people; a monumental conveyor belt.

Bayrle's imagery is sourced from both the Western and the Eastern world. His early interest towards Asian culture - especially towards the traditional approach to reality via collectivism  - and the role of the individual within the Chinese communist system are apparent in works like, for instance, in 1964's Mao und die Gymnasiasten (Mao and the gymnasts). A kinetic painting where hundreds of tiny gymnasts standing behind a portrait of the Chinese Chairman exercise in a communist mass parade. Despite the ideological differences, Bayrle points out at the similarities between the mass gatherings of communist China and those of consumerist capitalist countries.
Long before globalisation became a contemporary concern, the artist broke all power hierarchies in an attempt to redefine value. His visually perplexing collaged worlds recount of possible urban ecologies, maps and cityscapes made up of sameness and order,  in their repetition - ab infinitum - of architectonic units into kaleidoscopic points. Stadt am Meer (City on the sea), 1977 and Stadt am Wald (City near the woods), 1982 are two great examples of Bayrle's urbanism, imbued of mass production. They remind us of Le Corbusier modules of housing units: just another form of standardised production, houses can be built in the same way as a car can be put together on a conveyor belt.
Cars that are densely iconic not only of the development of technology and its commodityfication, but also of the post-war economic boom. As such, they often appear in Bayrle's works: Chrysler Star (1970), VW blau (Blue Volkswagen) and VW rot (Red Volkswagen) - both dated 1969 – are all superforms of social speed, a metaphor for the human power of creation and deletion of meaning.

Art is for Bayrle a tool to reorder reality and its meanings; his work is the result of an attempt at understanding the world by means of never-ending and unpredictable experiments. Objects and images, stretched and deformed in a continuous overlapping of consumption, comment with sharp irony on the human tragedy. A visionary theatre of the absurd where excitement, astonishment and optimism are mixed with feelings of horror and obsession.