PETER KOGLER

Peter Kogler, born in 1959 in Innsbruck, Austria, has since the 1980s developed one of the most distinctive practices spanning art, architecture and digital media. His characteristic installations transform entire rooms into immersive optical labyrinths, covering walls, ceilings and floors in endlessly repeating tube patterns that visitors move through rather than observe. Here, monumental curtains printed with his signature black-and-white tube motifs, warped as though subjected to the heat of glassblowing, envelop the architecture in the same disorienting way. 

The tubes, ants, brains and globes that form Kogler's visual vocabulary are condensed signs for the defining conditions of our digital present: connectivity, circulation, flow of information and the dynamics of networked systems. The tube stands for conduit and channel, the infrastructure through which information runs invisibly. The ant evokes swarm intelligence and collective organisation. The brain links biological cognition to digital processing. The globe extends these networks to a planetary scale. 

The space is dominated by four historic Barovier&Toso chandeliers, joined at the centre by a neon brain threaded with tubes of light: one rooted in centuries of Murano craft, the other an expression for networked consciousness that invokes the Enlightenment ideal of knowledge as luminosity. The glass objects are displayed on custom tables whose printed glass tops bear Kogler's tube patterns, drawing every surface into his visual world. 

For the first time in his career, Kogler has translated this vocabulary into Murano glass. Vase-like tubes move fluidly between sculpture and functional object, extending Kogler's longstanding dissolution of the boundaries between art and design. The ‘filigrana’ technique – delicate glass threads twisted into intricate linear patterns – mirrors his computer-generated networks. Ercole Barovier's checkered designs from the 1950s similarly anticipate Kogler's grids. Smaller objects carry his ants embedded using ‘murrine’, one of Murano's most venerable techniques, in which tiny glass medallions are fused within the form. Brains and globes blown in glass become luminous and weighty at once, transparent like the invisible data streams they represent, yet insistently material.  

In the adjacent room, a suspended mobile pairs a brain and a globe, illuminated from within, the mind and the world held in equilibrium, while backlit glass brains glow along the bar. Even the freight elevator has been drawn into the work: a glass brain illuminates a sofa upholstered in ant-patterned fabric, transforming the lift into a minimalist living room. Taken together, the exhibition leaves no surface, no object and no threshold untouched, proposing that in Kogler's world, as in the networked one we already inhabit, connection is not a state one enters but a condition we cannot leave.