Supergraphics

Künstler: Matthias Noggler

In Matthias Noggler’s paintings, the formal reference to popular imagery is constitutive. The references within his artistic practice range from documentary photography and modern architectural designs to mass media imagery. Potential connections between image and social space are always related to morphological questions—that is, by questions of structure, form, and appearance. In his new exhibition, he draws on the collage principles of posters, record covers, and geometric industrial design, while for the first time also engaging with so-called supergraphics. These are large-scale graphic designs employed by architects in the 1960s and 1970s to cover the interior and exterior walls of buildings in order to emulate the spatial effects of the architecture through painterly means.

The starting points of this exhibition are the spatial effects resulting from the juxtaposition of certain colors, as well as the range of intelligibility of specific objects—up to their complete dissolution into abstract fields of color and form. Here, Noggler transfers the (de)constructivist image principle of earlier paintings onto the iconic motif of the pistol. In their striking monstrosity, the isolated and highly enlarged weapons recall the ironic idealizations of consumer goods in Pop Art—especially since Noggler’s pistols are neither glamorous nor threatening—at most curious, and more often silly, limp, and entirely useless. At the same time, they occasionally address the viewer directly, almost like characters—just as Noggler’s image within the image, which shows the technocratic utopia of a schematically depicted landscape, can be understood as a rhetorical staging of the construction of perspective. Even in portrait mode, the autonomous life of these images is already in the process of disintegration.

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Jülicher Strasse 14, 50674 Köln , Neustadt-Süd

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