turbogym
Object: Artprint / Dimensions: 60,5 x 43,5 cm / Year: 2022
Super limited edition of two copies. Fine art pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 100% cotton. Professionally mounted under anti-reflective & anti-uv museum glass and framed with a natural oak ledge - edition 1/2 and 2/2 numbered and handsigned on front.
Turbogym is a tribute to the eighties. A period which particularly influenced the artist, as much in terms of design, music and lifestyle. An era in which MTV drastically changed our colour perception, Jane Fonda moved her body to the music of REO Speedwagon and the Opel Mantras & Audi Quattros made our streets unsafe. In this digital collage the artist tries to recover that which has been lost, artistically as well as emotionally. Turbogym was never displayed to the public and is part of a series of artworks from the artist's personal archives.
Not without nostalgia or irony, the visual universe of Paul Kirps traces a portrait of turn of the century design forms; a period when technological machines, mediums and formats appeared and disappeared in a flash before dematerialising completely into the digital cloud. He applies an extreme level of precision to the organisation and formal expression of this representation, counterbalanced only by irony or the disparate choice of motifs. Be it the logo of an industrial glue brand, the packaging of a VHS tape, the design of fitness equipment, the interface of a HiFi system, an ATM or an arcade game, Paul Kirps seems to be seeking to extract an object’s graphical code. Turbogym is the best example how he’s proceeding. Drawing on all spheres of hypermodern life (finance, consumption, communication, urbanism, sport and entertainment), he stages the formal and visual elements of our globalised industrial aesthetics.
