Peter Kogler
Peter Kogler is a pioneering artist in the field of computer-assisted creation. Employing cutting-edge technology, for the past thirty years the artist has made use of a series of recurring motifs, materialized in different forms: bi and tri-dimensional prints, sculpture, furniture, wallpaper, lighting fixtures, collages and other installations. Since the start of his career, his iconography has been made up of ants, brains, terrestrial globes, lightbulbs and wavy lines, and is a metaphor for networks, the constant stream of information and social ties.
For his new exhibition at the Galerie Mitterrand, Peter Kogler presents a visual and sound installation created in 2016 produced by and exhibited at the ERES Foundation in Munich the same year, and at K21 Düsseldorf in 2017. The artwork is a box measuring 235 x 260 cm, into which the visitor is invited to enter. In the inside, the walls, made up of LED screens and mirrors, endlessly reflect a computer-generated kaleidoscopic video animation. The visitors image is also reflected and is an integral part of this psychedelic and moving universe. This immersion into an abstract, hypnotic environment is characteristic of the video installations that Peter Kogler has developed since the early 2000s. Nevertheless, for the first time, Peter Kogler has designed a video installation that is technically not in situ and is therefore, not ephemeral. This time, it consists of a video work that is at once sculptural and subsequently moveable. This hybrid form might be considered a kind of Dream Machine of the 21st century.
An ensemble of collages created especially for the exhibition will also be on show. These works, conceived as "mood-boards", are made up of images collected by the artist over the past thirty years. These have been assembled according to protocols fixed by the artist and combined with his personal iconography. They constitute a mental landscape of sorts, a window onto the creative process specific to Peter Kogler. This confrontation of images has given birth to new motifs in his repertoire such as the pointing finger and the astronaut, here taking various forms.
Peter Kogler was born in Innsbruck in 1959 and lives and works in Vienna (Austria). Peter Kogler has been the focus of numerous international exhibitions, including Documenta IX (1992) and X (1997) in Kassel, as well as representing Austria at the Venice Biennale (1995). He has enjoyed solo exhibitions in numerous institutions such as the MAMCO Geneva (2007), the MUMOK Vienna (2009), the Museu Colecção Berardo Lisbon (2009) and more recently at the MSU Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb (2014), the Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna (2015), and the ING Art Center, Brussels (2016).
