translated and summarized by: Liz Wollner-Grandville,
220210: Galerie Bernd Kugler Bara – Monster Grid Paintings
Galerie Bernd Kugler
Bara – Monster Grid Paintings
23.01.10 until 27.02.10
Rationally overloaded
Grids, in addition to expressive paintings and integrated real objects, dominate the new mixed media work-cycle of the Berlin-based artist and recipient of the MAK-Schindler grant, Bara. These black grid-like structures, created with colour and tape, cover every collage and literally sprawl beyond the canvas into the gallery space. Bara declared the grid or grate to his artistic principle a long time ago. He considers his “grid paintings” as a metaphor for a rational worldview.
In parallel, as a dialectic contrast, he employs an intuitive expressive work method for his monochrome colour paintings.
The integrated real objects, such as utensils to brush your teeth, Halloween masks, flacons, photos, a head casting, portraits purchased at flea markets or heaps of colourful stickers trigger a series of both positive as well as negative associations. The artist intends to point to an iconographic coexistence of overloads, which dominate authoritarian ideologies or the mechanisms of a compulsive consumer world, simultaneously forcing them apart through irritation. Motifs such as Pac Man or a casting placed on the floor, and covered with the grid-like design, leaning on to Pinhead from the horror movie Hellraisers, symbolize the functioning of an unleashed consumer world. The artist describes his grid paintings as the formal possibility of a picture-like acquisition of gorging and digesting.
The grid, which is continued on the wall and the floor practically sucks the viewer in, swallows him. Bara makes an analogy to the process of the viewer “shrinking” on account of an authoritarian system, which ultimately degrades him to an object, which, in turn, can also be consumed. The problem he addresses becomes clear through the metaphorical reversion between the painting and the viewer: the paintings take the consumer’s position. Thus the linearity of consumerism by Bara, in the sense of Baudrillard, is already suspended.
By Romana Schuler
Galerie Bernd Kugler
6020 Innsbruck, Burggraben 6 (Hörtnagelpassage)
Phone: +43 / 512/ 561 748
Fax: +43 / 512 / 561 788
email: info@galerie-kugler.at
http://www.galerie-kugler.at
Opening hours: Tue-Fri 10-12 a.m., 3 – 6.30 p.m., Sat: 9 a.m. – 12.30 p.m.
220210
Galerie Bernd Kugler
6020 Innsbruck, Burggraben 6 (Hörtnagelpassage)
Tel: +43 / 512 / 561 748, Fax: +43 / 512 / 561 788
Email: info@berndkugler.at
http://www.berndkugler.at/
Öffnungszeiten: Di-Fr 13.00 – 18.00 Uhr, Sa 10.00 – 12.30 Uhr
Galerie Bernd Kugler
6020 Innsbruck, Burggraben 6 (Hörtnagelpassage)
Tel: +43 / 512 / 561 748, Fax: +43 / 512 / 561 788
Email: info@berndkugler.at
http://www.berndkugler.at/
Öffnungszeiten: Di-Fr 13.00 – 18.00 Uhr, Sa 10.00 – 12.30 Uhr