22.5.-3.7.04

The last exhibition before the summer break is dedicated to the Berlin based artist Beat Brogle. Lately beat Brogle had arouse international attention with his Internet Art project «one word movie» (www.onewordmovie.ch). His interactive installations are spectacular, as well are the landscape projects or interferences in urban structures. In Thun Brogle exclusively shows works on paper – which might absolutely rise above the normal edge of a sheet of paper. The show consists of a multitude of as yet shown drawings from the last ten years. But by no mean she should be understood retrospective, because lone work groups form in combination with newer series a concluded entity. To diversity of technique (conductive pencil, Chinese ink, silhouette on different kinds of paper) different formats are added. Resulting is a thrilling exhibition with very densely hung, but again loosely added groups.

The drawings take a center part in Brogles work. Like Sketches they seem to be the point of origin to his plastic and installed works. He is mainly interested in the invisible making of cast/form and he does not call his drawings by accident «amorphous». He is dealing light-handed with the conductive pencil, draws lines masterly across the sheets and creates in such a way an individual design vocabulary. On one hand he works with his «Loops», generously curved formations of irregular circles, all variations of a soft toy archetype, on the other hand he develops micro structural, net like up built worlds or narrative leaves. Outgoing from one point, the lines seem to successively coat, or even cover the whole sheet like a netting. The labyrinths, originated in such a way, are closed and finely branching line systems, which create the spectators an access to a hidden system or universe. Unexpected animal heads appear in the abstract composition, especially monkey heads. During a longer period of creation Brogle regularly visited a Zoo and determined the nature of animals by the use of sketches.

For the first time an important working field of the artist will get capaciously known by the special hanging. Next to the «hype» interactive projects, the drawing oeuvre should not be underestimated – without it, those would not exist.

Bernhard Bischoff, May 2004