Thomas Bayrle: Flying Home

Always rethinking its role as a public art fair in a capital of international contemporary art, in 2016 Artissima realises a new parallel project, thanks to a special collaboration with Torino Airport. A site-specific installation created by influential German artist Thomas Bayrle, “Flying Home” is hosted unexpectedly in the airport’s Baggage Claim area. The work is a physical pathway, a never-seen before sequence deriving from his monumental piece Flugzeug (1984) – an aeroplane made up of one million tiny planes – through its original matrix, printed on latex, stretched and distorted manually to form the total picture. The hands, human energies that are usually invisible, become fundamental parts of a total composition; they reveal the process of creation and, simultaneously, are the driving force and the message. “Flying Home” represents the relationship between individual and society, unit and whole: that rhythmic balance, repeated and wonderfully obsessive at the base of what moves, surrounds or projects us into the future.