Like any good installation artist, Peter Kogler likes to destabilize.

Displayed in several prominent European galleries and museums—including, interestingly, the Sigmund Freud museum, in Vienna—Kogler’s artificial worlds thrust visitors immediately into immersive currents of temporal, biological and psychological process.

Sometimes rendered in color, Kogler’s work can offer a massive accumulation of ways of perceiving and thinking, combining variegated abstractions of form and chromatics to suggest larger abstractions. Patterns emerge according to the viewer, but the spectrum of possibilities contained within his representations always seems to defy arrival.

The installations below are non-chromatic, and involve endless movement, sweeping up those within and carrying them along. The fact that only black and white are used—absences, not colors—brings the form of the installations into the forefront of the experience they offer. Occasionally, as in the Freud Museum installation, an overall grey results as mental processes swirl, combine, and contradict into convolutions of grey matter. Elsewhere, latitudinal and longitudinal waves create a corridor of matrix that compels travelers from one moment of travel into another; again, arrival in such streams of energy is rendered questionable, if not impossible. In the Zagreb MSU installation, floor, walls and ceiling course with entwined, formless and alternating tubes, a circulatory system of the temporal. How, then, does one arrive anywhere?

Elsewhere, as in the Art Brussels Kobler Lounge installation, a lattice of similarly shapeless tubes incorporates seating within, making them an inescapable fact of the comfortable, temporary stasis the word ‘lounge’ suggests. In an Innsbruck installation, a universal topography whelms visitors within a comprehensive idea of space and time.

Kogler’s earlier work occasionally uses more recognizable forms in their expressions, from ants to ice-cream cones, drawing viewers into circumspect reverie with their overt playfulness. At their most compelling, though, his installations seek to carry away pell-mell into the universal, not to merely distract into the passive subjectivity of daydream.