September 11 - 30. Januar 2021
The influential Viennese media artist Peter Kogler shows the installation EYES ONLY, for which he also uses a 3D LED fan for the first time. The artist, who teaches graphics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, is internationally renowned for his computer animations, video projections, and illusionistic as well as real spatial labyrinths that animate and redefine architecture.
Using computer-set,
digitally printed paper webs and a projection generated by a 3D LED fan, Peter
Kogler transforms the only 2.4 m² gallery space into a showcase of so much
attraction. Curved lines along the walls, ceiling and floor strive towards a
hologram-like, free-floating eye, which, like the human one, is constantly in
slight motion. The overall picture appears like a modern icon, which triggers a
wide range of associations in the viewer, ranging from the illusion of the
private sphere, through the public Big Brother level to the meta-level of the
divine eye.
EYES ONLY demands the
viewer's undivided attention: The staging can be grasped with one look.
Nevertheless, it demands the human perceptive faculty to the utmost, while the
small gallery space is extended to its extremes. With its neutral colour
palette of black, grey and white, it creates volume and movement from the
surface. The result is a space that is both real and simulated, in which there
is no fixed local anchorage except for the fixed point of the LED projection.
Peter Kogler generally does not use the central perspective for such projects,
since it offers the visitor too few possibilities to experience his immersive
installations in their entirety. The situation at EYES ONLY is quite different,
if only because of the general conditions: the spatial separation between the
viewer and art created by the window intensifies the central perspective as if
with a burning glass, thus emphasizing the direct focus on the eye, which
nevertheless remains unreachable. In this way, the installation oscillates
between illusionary expanse and real limitation as well as between intimacy and
distance, entirely in keeping with our times.In his stagings, which are often underlaid with
sound and reminiscent of futuristic film settings, the artist deals with
questions of spatial perception in a hybrid intermediate area between
sculpturally defined wall surface and pictorially defined architecture.
Subcontexts such as new media, sound and design play an essential role in this.
Against this background it is important to understand EYES ONLY as an
"over all" staging. With this project, Peter Kogler also confirms his
role as a pioneer for the current young generation of artists, who no longer
want to see themselves exclusively as artists, musicians or designers, but are
at home in the crossover of these disciplines.
Süddeutsche Zeitung-Kultur, by Evelyn Vogel