Thomas Bayrle: Faule Stellen

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Opening on the occasion of Gallery Weekend Berlin at our Linienstrasse and Christinenstrasse spaces, the pairing comprises works that employ portraiture as a means of navigating artistic lineage. Bayrle’s Faule Stellen features paintings and mixed-media prints that continue his career-long investigation of humankind’s relationship to industrialized mass production, employing multiplied modular forms to create intricate tableaux of modernity. Durchscheinen ist alles, the inaugural exhibition at our Christinenstrasse space, shows Bayrle engaging with his position among artistic peers, including Martin Kippenberger, Yayoi Kusama, Pablo Picasso and Elaine Sturtevant.

Recent works by Bayrle in Faule Stellen expand his adoption of the smartphone’s form as a component of imagemaking, deploying his signature technique of creating images from swarms of smaller, often distorted and warped motifs to shape portraits of industrial robots. He takes as his focus the mechanical arms now commonplace for repetitive manufacturing applications, building upon the artist’s fascination with the industrial mass production that continues to inform his practice. The pieces of machinery are positioned in the center of each composition, shown in various stages of their choreography-like articulation as if posed. Depicted against flattened backgrounds, they stand alone akin to subjects of formal studio portraits. Although highly automated, the machinery on display in Bayrle’s works often only supplements conventional labor rather than replacing it entirely – in such a capacity, it serves as a quasi-proxy for the human hand, parallel to Bayrle’s hybrid of digital and traditional modes of production.