Thomas Bayrle, born in 1937 in Berlin, has always been obsessed with Mao's China. He remembers seeing, as a young man, photographs of stadium-wide choreographed events there, where thousands of participants held up a sign on command, each sign a pixel in a giant picture. Of replicating that mass choreography in his early moving figurines--including Western figures who shaved or ate ice cream collectively--and of mixing Communist and capitalist elements in his work, he says, "irreconcilable ideological opposites thus become ever more similar--and down through the years become blurred--to the point of the global rock 'n' roll today." This volume drops viewers straight into Bayrle's prescient globalism through bright graphic works featuring repeating soldiers, Maos, chairs and chickens, in old-school silkscreen and recent digitized photographs. Softcover binding wraps all sides of the book, and pages are printed at full bleed, without text, except for the interview section.

Daniel Birnbaum, Udo Kittelmann, Hans-Ulrich Obrist