Peter Kogler

Austrian artist Peter Kogler (b. 1959) rose to international prominence in the late 1970s with his space-related works reflecting on the nature and impact of modern media. Kogler has developed a symbolic, ornamental image vocabulary that makes reference to the mediatisation of society, its increasing permeation by technology and the attendant potentials and pitfalls. His early drawings and cardboard objects with their modular figurative images already anticipate his later computer-generated works in which the identity and individuality of the human being are distorted and dissipated in grid-like anonymous portraits. In the ant and the brain the artist has found two basic motifs that unite the symbolic with the organic and thus make reference to the interpenetration of nature and technology, reality and virtuality. The labyrinth as symbol of a media-networked society is another central motif that Kogler interlinks with the real space in his extremely varied murals and video projections. Here, the traditional static Euclidian geometry of the space is superseded by an ephemeral, constantly changing appearance, which simultaneously transforms our perception of the space.

Kogler searches for a space in which signs shed the character of images, but produce an effect which is elusive. As he himself has joked, this has made him for many commissioning museums the ideal artist to install in a stairwell. In Lisbon, he has successfully internalised the complexity of the building designed in the 1980s by Vittorio Gregotti and Manuel Salgado and conceived an environment on a large scale.

At the Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (MUMOK) in Vienna, in 2008, the cubic space led him to conceive disintegrating crystals. In Lisbon, a network of pipes attaches itself to the highly designed space of the Museu Coleção Berardo galleries, inviting the viewer to plunge into the depths of the structure.