LONDON--At the behest of the Frieze Foundation, Maharam and the German artist Thomas Bayrle collaborated on an ambitious, 180 ft. long installation based on his 1967 silkscreened shoes series for this year’s Frieze London art fair. Frieze London, focusing solely on contemporary art and living artists, took place Oct. 11–14 in London’s Regent’s Park. Bayrle’s work was presented as part of Frieze Projects, an international program of site-specific artists’ commissions curated by Sarah McCrory.
Upon entering Frieze London, visitors were greeted by Sloping Loafers, which transformed the inclined main entrance corridor of this year’s temporary structure, designed by architects Carmody Groarke, with a floor-to-ceiling surround of vivid pop-art slip-ons in a complementary and contrasting signal palette of yellow-and-green and red-and-green on opposing entrance walls. The installation was completed by corresponding carpeting from Rutters.
Sloping Loafers by Thomas Bayrle is the latest addition to Maharam Digital Projects, a series of wall installations created by artists and designers. Sloping Loafers will also be shown in New York at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise through October 27.
A key figure in European Pop Art, Thomas Bayrle (b. 1937, Germany) has been active since the mid-sixties. His varied practice encompasses painting, sculpture, fashion and graphic design. Based in Frankfurt am Main, Bayrle focuses on consumerism, aestheticizing and magnifying its serial nature by replicating and repeating a single unit to form an expansive mass, thereby describing a world suspended between positive collectivism and deadening uniformity.
