PETER KOGLER

May 19, 2009 @ 9:06 PM - Paulo's Portugese

Who is Peter Kogler? You may asking...Here is the answer:

Peter Kogler is an Austrian artist (Innsbruck, 1959). The art of Peter Kogler is based on the concept of architectural spaces that oscillate between fiction and reality, between painting and large format video, in a world composed of signs and ideograms.
Peter Kogler started making a name in the international scene in the late 1970s with his space-related works reflecting on the nature and impact of modern media. Kogler has developed a symbolic, ornamental image vocabulary that makes reference to the mediatisation of society, its increasing permeation by technology and the attendant potentials and pitfalls. His early drawings and cardboard objects with their modular figurative images already anticipate his later computer-generated works in which the identity and individuality of the human being are distorted and dissipated in grid-like anonymous portraits.
In the “Ant” and the “Brain” the artist has found two basic motifs that unite the symbolic with the organic and thus make reference to the interpenetration of nature and technology, reality and virtuality. The labyrinth as symbol of a media-networked society is another central motif that Kogler interlinks with the real space in his extremely varied murals and video projections. Here, the traditional static Euclidian geometry of the space is superseded by an ephemeral, constantly changing appearance, which simultaneously transforms our perception of the space.

Kogler searches for a space in which signs shed the character of images, but produce an effect which is elusive. As he himself has joked, this has made him for many commissioning museums the ideal artist to install in a stairwell. In Lisbon, he has successfully internalised the complexity of the building designed in the 1980s by Vittorio Gregotti and Manuel Salgado (Centro Cultural de Belém, CCB) and conceived an environment on a large scale. In Lisbon, a network of pipes attaches itself to the highly designed space of the Museu Colecção Berardo galleries, inviting the viewer to plunge into the depths of the structure.

To confine Peter Kogler’s work to digital art would also be reducing its importance: even though Peter Kogler is adept at using video and synchronised projections, what interests him is not the technology, nor effect for its own sake.
Peter Kogler’s concern seems to be to work on the fringes of decorative and digital art, in order to gain a critical perspective on the proliferation of images. Since the 1980s, at the cutting edge of painting, sculpture and graphic design, Peter Kogler’s pieces have brought the viewer into the image. By arranging on the walls synthetic motifs drawn from a universe borrowed from electronic culture (tubular forms, lines of ants, capsules, bulbs, software-generated graphs…), the artist seeks to transform our perception of space. When he uses painting, at the frontiers of abstraction, his approach blurs with architecture and results in ephemeral décor.
Peter Kogler has been using repeated and combined digitalised motifs since 1980. In 1986, for his contribution to the Aperto, formerly the experimental section of the Venice Biennale, he produced a series of portraits on canvas entitled Kopf auf rot [head on red], which resemble caricatures. This series has found its natural place in the show in Lisbon.
The convolutions of the brain which fascinate him refer to the grey matter on the outer edge of the brain, the cellular substance containing the neurons, where electrical information is received, processed and incorporated, prior to issuing a response, the point of reception and emission.
Ants are the prime symbol of the organisational model. Kogler is interested in ants as archetypes, fictional characters, positive or monstrous, from a species regarded by specialists as an example of successful resistance to evolution. The ant-covered wallpaper designed for the exhibition allows the image to dress itself in, to “cover up” several meanings: it can itself cover up anything, but it can also be covered by works or other paper. Image, but also architecture. It’s a skin which shows something to the outside by covering up something from the inside, an overlapping pattern of interior and exterior.
Much has already been written on Peter Kogler’s all-enveloping wallpaper, such as that to be seen at Documenta IX in 1992, in the space left free by Bruce Nauman’s representatives in the entrance hall of the Fridericianum, or at the Secession in Vienna, in 1995, in a complete return to architecture, or that at documenta 12 in 2007. Kogler searches for a space in which signs shed the character of images, but produce an effect which is hard to pin down. As he himself has joked, this has made him for many commissioning museums the ideal artist for decorating a stairwell.
In Lisbon, he has successfully internalised the complexity of the building designed in the 1980s by Vittorio Gregotti and Manuel Salgado and conceived an environment on a large scale. At the Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (MUMOK) in Vienna, in 2008, the cubic space led him to conceive disintegrating crystals. In Lisbon, a network of pipes attaches itself to the highly designed space of the museum galleries, inviting the viewer to plunge into the depths of the structure.
(To do this text/post I’ve used the resume about Peter Kogler @ museuberardo website.) The photos (sorry for the quality...) were made by me. Enjoy!

This is the first thing you see at the Exhibition, imagine a wall with more than 6 meters high with this giant geometry design made by plastic tape