In Matthias Noggler’s paintings, the formal reference to popular imagery is constitutive. The references within his artistic practice range from documentary photography and mo-dern architectural designs to mass media imagery. Potential connections between image and social space are always related to morphological questions—that is, by questions of structure, form, and appearance. In his new exhibition, he draws on the collage principles of posters, record covers, and geometric industrial design, while for the first time also en-gaging with so-called supergraphics. These are large-scale graphic designs employed by architects in the 1960s and 1970s to cover the interior and exterior walls of buildings in order to emulate the spatial effects of the architecture through painterly means.
The starting points of this exhibition are the spatial effects resulting from the juxtaposi-tion of certain colors, as well as the range of intelligibility of specific objects—up to their complete dissolution into abstract fields of color and form. Here, Noggler transfers the (de) constructivist image principle of earlier paintings onto the iconic motif of the pistol. In their striking monstrosity, the isolated and highly enlarged weapons recall the ironic idealizati-ons of consumer goods in Pop Art—especially since Noggler’s pistols are neither glamo-rous nor threatening—at most curious, and more often silly, limp, and entirely useless. At the same time, they occasionally address the viewer directly, almost like characters—just as Noggler’s image within the image, which shows the technocratic utopia of a schemati-cally depicted landscape, can be understood as a rhetorical staging of the construction of perspective. Even in portrait mode, the autonomous life of these images is already in the process of disintegration.
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Supergraphics is Matthias Noglers’ (born 1990 in Innsbruck, Austria, lives and works in Berlin) second solo exhibition at Drei. He completed his studies in 2016 under Julian Göthe at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Recent exhibitions and contributions have taken place at Galerie im Saalbau, Berlin; Halle für Kunst Steiermark, Graz; Museum of Con-temporary Art in Belgrade, MoCAB, Belgrade; Linienstraße and oxfordberlin, Düsseldorf; Scherben, Berlin (all 2025, group); Layr, Vienna (2024, 2022, 2021, solo); Leopold Mu-seum, Vienna; Schleuse, Vienna; Take Ninagawa Gallery, Tokyo; Dom Museum, Vienna, LUKOWA Art Collection, Lucerne (all group 2024); Drei, Cologne (2023, solo and group). Works by Matthias Noggler will also be on display shortly in the exhibition Kunstpreis Junger Westen 2025 – Malerei, Kunsthalle Recklinghausen (from September 21).
