• Thomas Bayrle, installation of works by Thomas Bayrle in the 16th Biennale of Sydney 2008 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales,
  Courtesy the artist and Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin.
  Photograph: Jenni Carter
  

German artist Thomas Bayrle’s work is characterised by minute repetitions of figures mimetised within larger figures, so that the visual patterning he achieves makes it impossible to clearly discern the figures in a field of dizzy kinetic visuality. For the Biennale of Sydney, he has created a wallpaper and a series of more or less visible portraits of the notorious Venezuelan terrorist of the 1970s known as ‘Carlos’. During the search for German RAF (Rote Armee Fraktion) members, international terrorism increased and developed strategies for achieving secrecy that were ‘out of the grid’. ‘Carlos’ was one of these terrorists, constantly changing his identity to avoid capture. His activities were anarchistic and individualistic, as opposed to the collective nature of the RAF group. These portraits were made in 1977, the same year a film about ‘Carlos’ came out and the year of the German ‘Red Autumn’ – filled with terrorist attacks and culminating in the presumed suicide of members of the RAF in prison.

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