Take a stroll around The Yellow Building’s vast atrium and you can’t help but be drawn towards the friendly and colourful waddling duck created by pioneering German artist Thomas Bayrle. You’ll understand the translated title ‘Duck (from shoes)’ when you take a closer look – the whole screenprinted image is in fact composed of a series of hundreds of repeated cartoon shoes of various colour compositions!
Born in 1937 in Berlin and currently working in Frankfurt am Main, Bayrle’s work is characterised by an obsessive preoccupation with repetition and grid structures. Beginning his career as a designer, he went on to work within a textile factory and became fascinated by the repetitive patterns and rhythms of the machines and their mechanisms. Bayrle adopted serial repetition as a means to critically engage with mass consumerism, placing objects and motifs from daily life and mass advertising into serial patterns. His work has been strongly influenced by pop art and the idea of ‘mass society’, seeking to reflect on the individual within socio-political, industrial, and technological entities. Thomas
