Peter Kogler

Creator of the skate park located at Porte d’Italie in the south of Paris, which was ordered by the City council as part of the Tramway T3 project, twice selected for the Documenta in Kassel and for many international shows, Viennese artist Peter Kogler has been developing for the past twenty years an approach which implies the use of recurrent motifs through different media.

Ants, brains, terrestrial globes, light bulbs and interlaces draw a vocabulary with their own variations while staying visually uncluttered.Digitally modeled and then organized on all available surfaces and in space in two and three dimensions, these elements create social metaphors. Their haunting aspect also explains the ease with which they carry psychic content – which is not meaningless when one keeps in mind that Vienna was the birthplace of psychoanalysis at the beginning of the twentieth century. And is also the place where the question of ornament was the most sharply asked. Thanks to Peter Kogler, ants and brains take privileged places in the pantheon of the shapes that have been consecrated by modern art. But the anatomic element which obsesses him is not the skull itself, but its content. One could speak of the interest for its plasticity, but what appears immediately is the intrinsic link between the spirit and the matter that is implied by the use of this symbol.

For this exhibition, the artist presents new works such as a painted steel sculpture representing a light bulb, or a mural sculpture in cut steel in which ants motifs interweave. Mechanically produced drawings, prints on paper or an enameled painting on aluminum complete this exhibition which shows the formal diversity of Peter Kogler’s work as well as the coherence of his aesthetics.

At the same time as this new exhibition at the JGM. Galerie, Peter Kogler presents a video installation at Centre Pompidou as part of the Hors Piste 2012 exhibition.

Peter Kogler’s work has been widely shown internationally, including at Documenta IX (1992) and X (1997) in Kassel, at the Austrian pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1995), at the MAMCO in Geneva (2007), at the MUMOK in Vienna (2009) or at the Museu Colecção Berardo in Lisbon (2009).