thomas bayrle - bewegung im stillstand

In the organizer's words:

Thomas Bayrle's fourth solo exhibition with neugerriemschneider, bewegung im stillstand, features a new body of prints alongside collages and film from the 1980s and 1990s. Guided by the presentation's title - "idle movement" - each of the works on view in this unique constellation are centered on the interfaces between an accelerated modern life, systems in and of motion, and the nature that, against all odds, persists in their midst. Snaking escalators, uniform metropolises and traversing pedestrians become potted plants, floral motifs or overflowing bounties by way of Bayrle's signature compositional approach, the Superform - developed as a pre-digital technique and expanded here. Subjects and their component parts, duplicated and reshaped, enter a dialog around the manufactured and the organic, evolved from close engagement with the art-historical legacy of the still-life.

Throughout the exhibition, the artist brings into conversation dual fascinations that pervade his practice: modes of conveyance, and consumption of the mass-fabricated products of an industrialized society. Mobility, and the networks that enable it, have long appeared in his body of work as schematic highways, train tracks or conveyor belts, in reflections on the promise of infinite movement. He connotes people and goods in motion, the part rendered anonymous by the whole - contributors to the intricate machinery of the 20th and 21st centuries. Bayrle's engagement with production in great numbers, and an economy that both feeds and demands it, stems from his first-hand witness of the German economic boom in the wake of the Second World War, his time spent operating an industrial Jacquard loom in the 1950s and his work at an advertising agency in 1960s Frankfurt. From these experiences, Bayrle created an oeuvre that brings to the fore his embrace of the ritual-like repetition inherent in large-scale economic models, utilizing it to conflate and probe the individual, the collective and their nuances.

In Bayrle's Pianta Robusta I through VIII (all 2024) and Frutta Robusta II (2025), a computer-generated shopping center's escalators, running in parallel between its floors, repeats to form the works' backgrounds and their motifs. By turning to the escalator and the indoor mall, Bayrle continues his pictorial investigation of commerce. Occupied only sparingly, the images' ambiguous subjects exist as both newly constructed, pristine complexes, and once-grand structures pictured as their relevance wanes. The Pianta Robusta works' squared elements, arranged in nine-by-nine grids, bulge, stretch, twist, magnify, compress and wrap suddenly as the eye progresses toward the surfaces' centers. A potted plant emerges, its leaves bursting from a structured vessel. Printed in monochromatic greyscale, the works gain gestural touches of hand-applied acrylic paint that thinly coat fragments of the compositions in vibrant blues, greens, yellows and reds. The large-scale Frutta Robusta II shares this foundational scene, configured to a tipped basket and the pumpkins, eggs and corn it once contained, splayed out demonstratively before a viewer. Domesticized indoor plants take shape by way of digitally conceived architectural volumes, assembled to a sterilized city in Citta Pianta (2024), and urban motifs derived from those developed by the artist in the 1970s in Citta Pianta II (2024).

Natural life continues to take center stage in Bayrle's A Rose is a Rose (1985) - a monumental floral portrait collaged from reduced street maps, shrunk and transformed to densely textured, gradated segments. Stone - Rose (1985) adopts a similar motif, yet is comprised of fragmented photographs taken of A Rose is a Rose, and mounted on cardboard, highlighting the intricately nested, cumulative process from which the artist's work frequently results. In Bayrle's Gummibaum (1993 - 1994), this method is set into motion as successive stills depicting a crowd crossing a patch of pavement, printed on sheets of latex, are painstakingly sequenced to an eight-minute film. First shown in their flattened, unmanipulated states, the frames are manually maneuvered to become a plant's stem and leaves viewed as they rotate. Bayrle here summarizes the ethos that characterizes bewegung im stillstand, in which a world harnessed, contained or controlled, and the human-made apparatus of contemporary existence that populate it, are brought to coexist, the organic and the constructed partaking in symbiotic exchange.

Thomas Bayrle (b. 1937) is the subject of comprehensive retrospectives at SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT, Frankfurt am Main and Museum im Kulturspeicher, Würzburg in February 2026. He has previously been the subject of solo exhibitions at international museums and institutions including Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin (2023); New Museum, New York (2018); MAK - Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna (2017); Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2016); Lenbachhaus, Munich (2016); Institut d'art contemporain, Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes (2014); WIELS Centre for Contemporary Art, Brussels (2013); Madre - museo d'arte contemporanea Donnaregina, Naples (2013); Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2013); Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barcelona (2009); Musée d'art moderne et contemporain, Geneva (2009); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2008); and Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main (2006). His work has been shown at leading group exhibitions including three editions of documenta (3, 6, and 13) in Kassel (1964, 1977, 2012), the 8th Busan Biennale (2012), the 16th Biennale of Sydney (2008), the 9th Biennale d'art contemporain de Lyon (2007), the 4th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2006), the 6th and 8th Gwangju Biennale (2006, 2010), the 2nd and 6th Guangzhou Triennial (2005, 2018) and the 50th and 53rd Venice Biennale (2003, 2009). Bayrle has been the recipient of several awards and prizes, including the Arnold-Bode-Preis (2012), the Cologne Fine Art Prize (2000) and the Prix Ars Electronica (1995). Bayrle lives and works in Frankfurt am Main.

For further information, please contact: mail@neugerriemschneider.com.