Artist Statement

Exhibition. Centre des arts d’Enghien-les-Bains, Apr 18 – July 9

The exhibition of the internationally renowned Austrian artist Peter Kogler, is a reminder of the familiar lexicon of his work from the bottom up, and at the same time an overview of more than 40 years of activity that highlights the go-forward of this prodigious artist, a pioneer in the use of digital technology in visual arts.

For this exhibition the artist operates from floor to ceiling, on the walls and in the space, signing his elaborated vision of the interlacing the nets. We witness a constant desire to differ, to shift, to upgrade not in the sense of arrangements with the same but in the dialectical sense of advances specific to Viennese modernism because the questions of modernity are at the heart of his works.

Curators: Dominique Roland, Director of the Arts Centre & Ami Barak, curator of the exhibition

From https://www.cda95.fr/fr/agenda/peter-kogler :

“Visual language is a vocabulary in itself. (…) The meaning of a work depends on the place and the moment”  _Peter Kogler

Peter Kogler is an Austrian artist, pioneer of computer-aided creation. Since the 80s, at the borders of painting, sculpture and graphic design, he has been inspired by post-modern society, its sprawling networks, its information and communication systems that compose it.

The result is these environments composed of interlacings which are repeated within images where the organic and the electronic hybridize. A kind of mental landscape that the artist imagines as a representation of infinity and proliferation. Diverting architecture, the artist transforms our perception of space and our relationship to the work, notably by placing the viewer at the heart of the work.

In the form of silkscreen prints, wallpapers or even collages, sculptures, furniture or immersive light devices, Peter Kogler develops a universe composed of tubular shapes, alignments and graphics from computer software borrowed from the electronic culture. In his compositions, he uses the same patterns that he repeats on the surface and over time. Strong and universal symbols. The brain, which refers to the idea of ​​an organic computer, the ant, worker and docile but master of the labyrinthine networks that the artist develops in reference to networks, flows and social links, and more recently still, a arms and a hand pointing towards the material as if to remind us that beyond technological innovations, without the hand, the machine is nothing.

More videos on https://www.kogler.net/wordpress

• Peter Kogler (born 1959 in Innsbruck, AT) is an Austrian media artist. Kogler studied from 1974 to 1978 at the Kunstgewerbeschule (today HTL Bau + Kunst) in Innsbruck, which was followed by studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna from 1978 to 1979. From 1986 to 1987, Kogler acted as Thomas Bayrle’s representative at the State University of Fine Arts – Städelschule , Frankfurt am Main. In 1993 he became a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and from 1997 headed the class for new media. Since 2008 he has held a professorship for graphics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. Through the use of repetitive pattern systems printed on paper webs, computer animations and video projections, Kogler creates walk-in, illusionistic spatial labyrinths that stretch across ceilings, walls and floors and occupy the viewer’s entire field of vision. [Source: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Kogler]  https://www.kogler.net/wordpress