Thomas Bayrle's super forms and 1960s German Pop-Art
Thomas Bayrle's artistic career began in the mid-1960s, a decade marked by profound political and cultural changes in Germany. The Federal Republic of Germany experienced an economic boom that favored technical innovations and fundamentally changed consumer behavior in society. Youth culture, the sexual revolution and various protest movements also led to a new cultural self-awareness that questioned traditional values and established an alternative lifestyle. In this social environment, the predominantly abstract post-war painting of the 1960s was replaced by a new, figurative movement that was clearly influenced by Pop Art from America and Great Britain. Among its representatives are Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg in Düsseldorf, K. H. Hödicke and Lambert Maria Wintersberger in Berlin, as well as Peter Roehr and Thomas Bayrle in the Frankfurt am Main circle. The son of an artist and an art historian, he initially began training as a weaver and dyer in Göppingen in 1956. In 1961, he founded the publishing house “Gulliver-Presse” in Bad Homburg together with Bernhard Jäger and worked in advertising, influences that would also be reflected in his art.

His work “Motta” from 1966 is one of the early highlights in Peter Bayerl's oeuvre, created in the cultural environment of the 1960s. It is composed of two wooden elements and shows the advertising face of the Italian ice cream maker “Motta” in the center of the picture, with the company name in capital letters below it. From a distance, the overall impression seems oddly gridded. In close-up, it shows that the entire surface in the foreground is covered with small portraits reminiscent of postage stamps. Countless male figures with black hair, red jackets, white shirts and ties look at us with black eyes and red mouths, but at the same time disappear into the masses due to their uniformity. The male figures are also known from Thomas Bayrle's work “Mao”, also from 1966. It shows a portrait of Mao Zedong in the center of the picture, which can be tilted and converted into a red star with the help of a built-in motor. Like “Motta”, it is made up of countless micro-portraits representing the Chinese people. The main motif, which Thomas Bayrle calls a “superform”, is represented by Moa and the red star, and is formed there from countless subforms that correspond in content to the superordinate motif. Thomas Bayrle, who was intensively studying Maoism and China at the time, found the inspiration for this form of representation in photographs of Chinese stadiums, which made a strong impression on him: “Images of the Chinese Revolution could be seen on the huge walls of people. These “super signs” were composed of thousands of dots, which on closer inspection proved to be signs [...] picture-patterned grids of thousands of people who, on command, held up or lowered colored signs.” (Thomas Bayrle, in exhibition catalog Thomas Bayrle. 40 Years Chinese Rock 'n' Roll, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt a. Main, 2006)

In contrast to “Mao,” in “Motta” the principle of the “superform” of the advertising face and its subforms, the representatives of the Chinese people, is reversed. Here, the world of capitalism meets the politically connoted motifs of communism unfiltered, mass production meets mass movement, Western profit-seeking meets the ideas of the largest Eastern people's republic. As Thomas Bayrle himself says, he was never concerned with visualizing ideological contradictions: “I paid little attention to ideological differences and mixed communist and capitalist elements and content together – against the protest of my left-wing friends... According to the motto “technical patterns on this side / organic ornaments on that side”, in my imagination, East and West interwove like warp and weft in one and the same fabric... Irreconcilable ideological differences became more and more similar – and blurred over the years – until the currently unfolding “Global Rock ‘n’ Roll”.” (Thomas Bayrle, quoted in: MMK Frankfurt a. Main, online: www.mmk.art/de/whats-on/thomas-bayrle - accessed on March 6, 25). Whether consciously or unconsciously, deliberately or by chance: with the work “Motta”, Thomas Bayerle succeeds in creating a congenial conglomeration of seemingly irreconcilable contradictions and conflicting world views. The work, which had been in private hands since the 1960s, was exhibited in public for the first time in 2002 and has since been shown in almost all of the artist's important solo shows over the past 25 years, which undoubtedly speaks to the great significance of the work in the artist's oeuvre, which began in the epochal 1960s. [AR]