Exhibition Run: 20 April 2005 - Sunday 5 June 2005

Private View: Tuesday 19 April 2005, 7:00PM to 9:00PM

Curated by David Bussel

Cubitt is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition in the UK of Thomas Bayrle, who will present a series of offset print works from the early Seventies. The works on view are part of Bayrle’s initial foray into printmaking, an early investigation into a medium he has experimented with ever since.

Bayrle’s work with printmaking, photo-collage and design has been called ‘Piranesi-esque’ with its complex, micro/macro patterning that generates a kind of visual synecdoche: a figure of speech where the word for a part of something is used to mean the whole or vice versa. Diverse areas of ‘knowledge’ such as nanotechnology, cybernetics, pornography, urbanism and advertising provide the foundation, the impetus and the raw material of Bayrle’s practice. Through the relationships of dot and grid or cell and conduit, the artist creates pictorial superstructures that analogise the social frameworks we inhabit. Bayrle constructs architectonic, technically innovative imagery that perturbs perception through its iconoclastic use of forms. In addition to his two dimensional works, the artist also produces sculptural objects: cardboard maquettes of serpentine motorways that suggest another kind of superstructure of urban ecologies.

As a founding figure in Germany’s Pop movement along with Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter, Thomas Bayrle has been influential as both an artist and as a teacher at Frankfurt’s Staedelschule for over thirty years.

Thomas Bayrle will be at Cubitt to present a selection of his film and video work on 4 May 2005, at 7pm.

Thomas Bayrle (b. 1937, Germany) has exhibited internationally since the Sixties. Recent exhibitions include Oldenburg Kunstverein (Germany), Galerie Barbara Weiss (Berlin), Graz Kunstverein (Austria), Museum Ludwig (Cologne) and the 50th Venice Biennale. He lives and works in Frankfurt, Germany.