Transcript

My name is Helga Christoffersen. I’m one of the curators here at the museum and a co-curator of Thomas Bayrle: Playtime.

The wall of silk screen prints that you’re standing in front of exemplifies very well the diversity of imagery that Thomas Bayrle uses in his work. All these silk screens are made as you see through the method of his superform, the use of very small parts into the making of large images but that said it also draws out the kind of two ends of the spectrum of his visual imagery. On the one hand, a very big interest in consumer products and advertisements. You see imagery here such as the beer or the car that could almost be advertisement images. And then on the other hand also really testaments his political engagement at the time, he was an active part of the student movement, an active part in general revolt of the time.

And so these prints he very much used to comment also on everyday events. You see politicians from Philip Brant (sp?). The other work titled corporate identity, you have Stalin, you have an image made of a Marxist-Leninist cowboys. You have two works that are stock exchange manipulated stock exchange reports and so Bayrle himself really inserted his visual imagery onto these images that were very much problematized the current of the time.

Following onto that, is also a series of prints that you see on the end wall which is a folder called Fire in the Wheat. Which is also Bayrle’s comment on the sexual revolution of the time and the fact that he also lived to see the kind of sudden entrance of very sexual imagery into kind of an everyday visual culture.