Curated by Chus Martínez

Few museums have done as much to put Europe on the map of postwar art as MACBA. After mounting retrospectives of the work of Lothar Baumgarten, Öyvind Fahlström, Robert Filliou, Blinky Palermo, and Antoni Tàpies, MACBA now gives Thomas Bayrle a turn. Since the early 1960s, the Frankfurt-based artist has been obsessed with the notion of “the mass”—a discrete unit repeated numerous times in a work. The informal continuity of his oeuvre’s relentless repetitions makes pointedly disconcerting equivalents of disparate iconographic sources—whether drawn from consumerist or communist propaganda, tourist advertising or porn. In addition to some three hundred collages, prints, paintings, sculptures, models, and films, this exhibition will showcase a rare lineup of preparatory drawings to allow insight into Bayrle’s signature working method, which conjoins the manual, the mechanical, and the digital.

— Christine Mehring