thomas bayrle | flying home

PRESS RELEASE
Artissima – International Fair of Contemporary Art and Torino Airport - Sagat
are pleased to present
THOMAS BAYRLE | FLYING HOME
Curated by Sarah Cosulich
An Artissima 2016 off-site project in the baggage claim area of Turin airport
Friday, 4 November 2016 - Thursday, 28 May 2017
Press Preview: 2 November 2016 (by invitation only)
On occasion of its 2016 edition, Artissima presents Flying Home, a new and unprecedented
parallel project, specially conceived for the city, realised in collaboration with Torino Airport and
curated by Sarah Cosulich.
For the first time, Torino Airport - Sagat is participating as a partner in an art commission,
accepting Artissima’s challenge to experiment with new models, unexpected places and different
audiences. These two, seemingly unrelated institutions of the city, have collaborated on a
surprising cultural initiative, inviting the influential German artist Thomas Bayrle to create a site specific work for Torino airport.
Thomas Bayrle (b. 1937, Berlin) is considered the pioneer of the German Pop Art movement. A
forerunner of digital language before it could ever have been imagined, Bayrle has been creating
images since the 1960s that use the same – or related – smaller pictures, infinitely repeated as
units of a whole.
The airport, a place of transit in which thousands of lives intersect every day, is a particularly
significant and recurrent theme in the artist’s research. His work reveals the dynamics of our
society, of our movements through space, of economy, of technology, even of religion, all in
connection with each other and being guided by a fundamental principle of repetition. Creator of
a form of ‘artisanal digitalisation’, Bayrle has built ‘by hand’ images that, years later, computers
would process automatically: he draws, prints, distorts, cuts and reassembles units that then make
up whole.
For Flying Home, Bayrle has chosen the baggage claim area, which will be transformed into an
unexpected and stimulating exhibition space, deeply imbued with meaning. Through an
unprecedented sequence of images, Flying Home reveals the mechanisms of the construction of
his mammoth piece, Flugzeug (Aeroplane, 1984), a large-scale print of a plane made up of a million
small aeroplanes on a 96-square-metre surface.
The airplane depicted in Flying Home is the same one that he created in 1980 for Lufthansa when,
fascinated by the message of speed, technology, and the future that the airline represented,
Bayrle printed this work in a limited edition to be distributed to passengers. The Lufthansa matrix,
a silkscreen composed of 1,960 small airplanes, modified and altered in as many units as were
necessary, had in 1984 become one of the hundreds of models of the gigantic Flugzeug.
In Flying Home, the same matrix used by the artist in the past acquires an additional level: human
presence, collaboration, interaction, gesture, and three-dimensionality. Highlighting for the first
time the complex manual process of his practice, Bayrle hints at the ‘backstage’ of the airport: the
human side that is hidden in its functioning, yet fundamental to the definition of the ‘total
composition’.
Artissima’s project with Torino Airport connects the city through art in an engaging manner,
welcoming all incoming travellers. Visitors not travelling by air are also invited to see the work,
and a schedule of special visit times can be consulted on the Artissima and Torino Airport
websites.
Conceived and produced by:
Artissima and Torino Airport | Sagat
Partners:
IGPDecaux
Lufthansa
MyChef
Heinemann
With the support of:
Camera di commercio di Torino
Goethe-Institut Turin
BIOGRAPHY
Thomas Bayrle (b. 1937, Berlin) lives and works in Frankfurt.
A professor at the renowned Städelschule, in Frankfurt — where he was mentor to a group of
prominent students, including Sergej Jensen, Tobias Rehberger, Tomas Saraceno and Thomas Zipp
— Bayrle has experimented with music, design, graphics and publishing. Known as an ‘artist’s
artist’, Bayrle has investigated the dynamics of production and mass communication, anticipating
the dominant questions of a globalised society. He deconstructs both the structure and the
meaning of everyday objects, multiplying them out to infinity to reveal their paradoxes: his work
reflects upon the relationship between man and community, the individual and the whole, process
and product.
His works have been presented in museums and institutions around the world, including: MACBA,
Barcelona, and MAMCO, Geneva (2009); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2008); documenta, Kassel
(1964, 1977, 2005, 2012); and Venice Biennale (2003, 2009). The Thomas Bayrle retrospective ‘All in-One’ was exhibited in 2013/14 at WIELS, Brussels; MADRE, Napoli; Baltic Centre for
Contemporary Art, Gateshead, and IAC, Villeurbanne/Rhône Alpes.
ARTISSIMA 2016
International Fair of Contemporary Art
4-5-6 November 2016
OVAL – Lingotto Fiere
T +39 011 19744106 – F +39 011 19746106
Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, 12 – 10123 Torino
www.artissima.it | [email protected]
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Arti s sima is a brand of Regione Pi emonte, Città Metropolitana di Torino and Città di Torino. On behalf of these three authori ties, it is
promoted by Fondazione Torino Musei. The 23rd edition of Artissima i s being held with the s upport of the three brand-owning
a uthorities, jointly with Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT, Compagnia di San Pa olo a nd Ca mera di commercio di
Tori no. The orga nisation of Arti ssima i s overseen by Arti s sima s rl, a company formed i n 2008 to ma na ge the fa ir’s a r tistic and
commercial relations.
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