NYAB Event - Michael Bauer "H.S.O.P.

Michael Bauer "H.S.O.P. - 1973"

Lisa Cooley Fine Art

This event has ended.

Lisa Cooley announces Michael Bauer's first solo show at the gallery, which will also be his first solo show in New York. His work is well known in Europe, and has been presented in numerous museum exhibitions there. He recently moved from Berlin to New York, and presents this new, energetic group of works to our audience.

In Michael Bauer's paintings, figurative elements appear throughout the work, and just as quickly disappear into chaotic moments of abstraction. He speaks about the paintings as being portraits of gangs, families, music bands, collectives, or mobs - a grouping of characters revealed through the occasional eye or profile emerging from shadowy abstraction. Flat, crisp, bright, patterns usually provide the structure from which these organic nebulas originate.

Bauer spent a length of time last year focusing on collage and drawing, processes which have energized this body of work with openness, dynamism, lightness, and mischievous humor. Thick, craggy skeins of pure color replace the tones and tints of earlier works, while open areas of almost raw canvas supplant his previous heavy layers. Concentrated areas of small, quick, hatched marks refer back to the mark making utilized in Bauer's earliest paintings from his teenage years. The omnipresent absurdity in Bauer’s work has likewise been amplified – his figures appear more inane, more incongruous, more vernacular.

Bodies, either actual corporeal depictions or just visceral materials, feature prominently in the artist’s works as well. Lop-sided grins, deflated genitalia, and loosely defined limbs emerge from areas of thick impasto. Smaller works feature dark gashes of lumpen, brown paint, referencing wounds or other bodily matter. Each painting includes a large foot, or foot-like shape, and is titled using a European shoe size alongside the acronym H.S.O.P – an arbitrary reference to the Hudson River School of painting.

Bauer uses various framing devices such as dots in the corners of the canvases or checkered grids to divert the picture away from the illusionism of painting. He likens the canvases to playing cards, and sees each one as a character in an unfolding cast; a mad tea party of sorts in which the paintings become posters or trailers for a film. A sense of inner turmoil abounds from which spectral profiles materialize, leaving traces of a psychologically obtuse landscape.