Thomas Bayrle: Form Form SuperForm

Form Form Superform is a major retrospective of work by Thomas Bayrle, one of the most prolific and pioneering German artists of his post-war generation. Since the 1960s he addresses recurrent themes such as labour, power, economics and religion, narrating the relationship between individual and collective dynamics in society. 

Anticipating the pixel aesthetic in the digital image-making, Bayrle is famous for his “superforms”, complex patterns constructed from images of people, goods, and machines, that the artist has interpreted through a wide range of media, from printing techniques to painting, from sculpture to film.

In a dialogue with the new installation conceived by Bayrle for the Pista 500, Form Form SuperForm will focus on the artist’s main concerns and iconography, such as the car as a symbol of movement and energy, status symbol and mass product. The former Fiat factory in Lingotto represents an ideal venue for this exhibition and for the artist interested in industrial mass production and consumer society, in a fascination that already led him to look to Fiat as a source of inspiration for his work as early as the 1970s.