"For artists, life experience is an island they can
always return to"
A visit with Thomas Bayrle
With
a lot of patience Thomas Bayrle became one of Germany's best art
professors. Today he says: "I've learned as much from my colleagues as
they have from me." Daniel Völzke talked with the very
busy emeritus, who is represented with numerous works in the Deutsche
Bank Collection.
Thomas
Bayrle
Photo: Wolfgang Günzel
Courtesy
Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin
Does he
miss teaching? Perhaps. But he actually has enough to do, says Thomas
Bayrle. Six years ago the artist went into retirement, yet when he was
a faculty member he seldom had more work than he does today. Teenagers
walk by his studio - some smoking, some not, some pensive, some perky. In
between it's quiet, albeit only briefly. Here in the charming old building
in Frankfurt-Eschersheim that they live in, the Bayrles are virtually
surrounded by youth. A kindergarten and a school on the street ensure
there are bursts of life in the neighborhood. But life used to be merrier
here, says, Helke Bayrle, the artist's wife. In the old days there were no
fences between the plots of land. Thomas would dress up as a witch, she
says, and run through people's yards and frighten kids.
Thomas
Bayrle, Lindwurm, 1970, © VG Bild – Kunst, Bonn 2008,
Deutsche
Bank Collection
Thomas
Bayrle is sitting in his studio, surrounded by prototypes and models for
upcoming exhibitions, as well as by works of former students. Starting in
1975 he taught at the Frankfurter Hochschule für Bildende Künste, the Städelschule
art academy. At that time, he already knew how to run a kinderladen, or
antiauthoritarian children's nursery; he and his wife had founded one they
directed themselves. He saw a continuation of the kinderladen principle in
the orientation class of the Städel School that he now taught: first let
the kids do what they want to, give them suggestions, talk. Above all the
latter: talk. The artist, who himself studied at the rather strict Werkkunstschule
Offenbach, first had to discover his teaching talent. He was very
skeptical about whether he was cut out for the job, says the professor
emeritus today.
Thomas
Bayrle, Kennedy in Berlin, 1964, © VG Bild – Kunst, Bonn 2008,
Deutsche
Bank Collection
Over
thirty years later, Thomas Bayrle is in demand as an artist more than ever
before. At some point the art world became curious about the man who
taught so many of their favorites - stars like Tobias
Rehberger, Sergej
Jensen, and Thomas
Zipp. He owes his success in part to his students, the 71-year-old
says repeatedly during our talk. They always supported him, while people
of his generation no longer believed in him and didn't understand his work.
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Thomas Bayrle, Christel von der Post,
1970, © VG Bild – Kunst, Bonn 2008,
Deutsche
Bank Collection
It's as though the times have finally caught up with the
progressive artist. At large-scale retrospectives of his work, such as the
one mounted at the Frankfurt Museum
für Moderne Kunst in 2006, you could get an idea of just how far
out front Thomas Bayrle was. Together with his friend Peter
Roehr, he worked on a German variant of Pop Art, responding to mass
culture with serially produced graphic works picturing everyday products
redundantly arranged into patterns. Bayrle printed coats and wallpapers,
and was one of the first in Germany to deal with the language of
advertising, even working in an ad agency himself. Also astonishing in
retrospect are his automatic reliefs that through digital data processing
simulate socialist mass processions and the pixilization of the world that
spread only much later. In the seventies, the Frankfurt artist worked with
computer-generated prints, then with graphics animations. The stubborn
rumor that the pictorial revolutionary and advertising strategist designed
the logo of the Red
Army Faction was in keeping with his pioneer spirit. Given how curious
he is about new things, it comes as no surprise when he says about his
time as a professor: "In the end I learned just as much from my young
colleagues as they did from me."
Thomas
Bayrle, (b)alt 1997, computer animation, still: sleep, © VG Bild – Kunst,
Bonn 2008,
Deutsche Bank
Collection
Class is an exchange. A class
is composed of all kinds of people, whose experiences and ways of looking
at the world become interwoven. You export your problems and import the
others' problems. "A garbage collection point" is what Thomas Bayrle calls
the art academy as institution and compares art class with the process of
weaving. In his youth, before he attended the Werkkunstschule, he did an
apprenticeship as a draftsman for textile design, as a dyer and weaver in
Göppingen. "Back then it had already dawned on me that weaving is also a
metaphor," says Bayrle. In his prints, in his dynamic motor-driven
reliefs, in his collages, films, wallpapers and textiles, the reciprocal
penetration is omnipresent, as though consisting of warp and woof. Smaller
elements combine to create something bigger; tiny figures move as though
in a crowd of people and miniature highways telescope into a texture.
Thomas
Bayrle, Der Tiger übt, 1969, © VG Bild – Kunst, Bonn 2008,
Deutsche
Bank Collection
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