Thomas Bayrle, Super Colgate / Teeth Cleaner, 1965. Oli, fusta, metall, construcció amb motor 100 x 120 x 15 cm. Museum am Ostwall Dortmund.

BARCELONA.- Not only Mao before the masses, but also dozens of housewives armed with brooms, scores of Gillette razors and hundreds of Mon Chéri chocolates. In a play on perceptions in which nothing (or everything) is what it seems, in the midst of a profusion of food tins, cleaning products, cars, reinforced concrete buildings andmotorways that populate the works of Thomas Bayrle (Berlin, 1937). Under the title Thomas Bayrle. I’ve a Feeling We’re Not in Kansas Anymore , the Contemporary Art Museum of Barcelona (MACBA) presents the first retrospective devoted to this artist’s artist. His work is a precursor of nanotechnology, urban ecology and the digital revolution, and he is considered a leading representative, along with Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter, of the Pop Art movement in Germany where his exhibitions were scorned for years. Instead, Bayrle carved out for himself a career as a teacher of artists, “beyond the river of influences”, at the Städelschule in Frankfurt.

Though acclaimed as one of the voices of Pop Art in Germany, the truth is that Bayrle’s ironic, repetitive, almost grotesque visual displays ultimately subvert the paradigms of the Pop movement. His works are practically psychedelic maps constructed from mosaics of images and hallucinatory to a point far beyond pop’s hypnotic and surface effects. A trick—a strategy, in reality—with a clear purpose: to denounce the excesses of mass culture.

In what is almost a contamination of the space, four original wallpaper applications turn the ramp, the tower and the white walls of the MACBA building into a feast of colours and forms, whilst 300 “paint machines”, 16 mm film collages, digital animations, graphic works, cardboard sculptures, watercolours, drawings and photographic collages take the visitor on an artistic journey that spans more than forty years. This is not the typical retrospective: it begins where it ends, or ends where it begins. “You let things fall, from one hierarchy to another, and then you put them together again. The world is not a fixed image. It is always necessary to blow up the universe of things, or to reduce it to a grain of sand or into molecule clouds in order to reconstruct it in the imagination”, warns Bayrle.

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Tags MACBA Retrospective Thomas+Bayrle Bayrle Pop+Art subversions Barcelona