(born in Berlin in 1937)
Norman Mailer, 1971, signed, dated Bayrle 71, again signed, dated on the reverse, acrylic on canvas, 100 x 76 cm, framed

We are grateful to Thomas Bayrle for confirming the authenticity of the work.

Provenance:
Galerie Ute Parduhn, Düsseldorf
Private Collection Berlin - acquired from the above

Bringing together, repeating, networking. These keywords capture Thomas Bayrle‘s work briefly and succinctly. Bayrle elevates the continuous pattern repeat to a stylistic principle. He mostly uses everyday motifs in his works, and avoids making ideological distinctions, whether political or religious.
His works are undoubtedly inspired by Pop Art and Neo-Dadaism. He laid the foundation of his trademark - serial repetition in grid structures - as a teenager during his two-year training as a weaver. Bayrle originally aspired to be a textile engineer, which is entirely in keeping with his inclination towards the consistent principle of the serial and the grid. He sees the world as a surface held together like a fabric by threads.

He developed his „superforms“ from the late 1960s onwards by internalising the language of looms, keeping the textile ornament, the ornament of the masses, front of mind. He creates a new overarching form from many small individual parts of the same motif. As he says, he thematises the relationship „from the individual to the mass“, and thus criticises the mass production of contemporary capitalist society. These themes of mass consumption and mass production determine his oeuvre, and create the pictorial form that becomes characteristic of his art.

He creates the likeness of the American writer, journalist and director Norman Kingsley Mailer from the sequence of a single motif - the pencil. The portrait „hides“ behind the pencils. Only at a certain distance from the picture does the viewer discover the writer’s portrait. A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, Mailer‘s writings dealt with themes of violent tendencies and sexual neuroses, and he was considered a sharp critic of US society. The classic writer’s tool becomes Bayrle‘s instrument and, through the stylistic devices of juxtaposition, distortion, colouring and curvature, is transformed into the new overarching structure of Mailer‘s portrait.

„I wanted to become a pattern draughtsman and learn how to punch cards in order to be able to ‚programme‘ patterns. [...] It seemed fantastic to me to be able to use geometric thread elements to build individually point by point, line by line.“

Thomas Bayrle, 1995, in an interview with Kunstforum magazine