We are pleased to present Peter Kogler at Galerie Mezzanin Geneva.
Widely celebrated for his metaphorical installations which investigate architectonical spaces in their totality, covering all available surfaces – walls, floors and ceilings – with silkscreen-printed paper or animated images, Peter Kogler is an artist of various influences – Viennese Actionism, Pop, Minimal and Conceptual Art – his work is in a constant state of evolution, parallel with the development of digital technology, which he exploits in an insatiable manner since its very beginnings. Originally inspired by film and props of expressionistic cinema (Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari from 1919 and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis from 1927), his allegorical labyrinths, the complexity of which is first masked by an apparent legibility, interlace, repeat infinitely, and confuse our perception of real and virtual space, creating a schizophrenic tension between fascination and discomfort, all daring to put the idea of the ornament in question.
On the gallery walls one sees not “ornamental frescoes” but recent collages and a combination of recurring motifs for the artist – ants, the brain, tubes and pipes, the light-bulb, the globe – signs chosen for their immediate legibility but also for their ambivalence, as carriers of multiple metaphorical hypotheses related to the social and the network. Two-dimensional on the surface of a canvas, or as three-dimensional objects, they testify a great rigor in the geometry of the drawing with refined lines, as if the sole recognition of the universality of these objects was enough to indicate all the complexity of their significance.
The collages, composed from images originating in various media and collected over the years, evoke with a certain irony the process of digital communication and the incessant flux of data that characterizes our ultra-connected society, in which the artist inscribes himself with complete legitimacy.
Peter Kogler was born in 1959 in Innsbruck in Austria. He lives and works in Vienna. Starting 2008, he has been a professor of graphic art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. His work has been shown in various solo exhibitions in art-centres, galleries, and museums in Europe, the USA and Asia. Among others, he participated in Documenta IX and X (1992 and 1997), in 45th, 46th and 49th Biennale of Venice (1993, 1995 and 2001), Secession, Vienna (1995), Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (1996), Mamco (1999 and a retrospective in 2007), Kunsthaus Bregenz (2000), Kunstverein Hannover (2004), Shanghai Biennale (2006), MoMA (2006), MUMOK, Vienna (2008), Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt am Main (2010), Mudam, Luxembourg (2010), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2012).