Monika Baer “loose change”

Greene Naftali Gallery

[Image: Monika Baer "Untitled" (2020) Oil on canvas. 85 x 57 in. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin; and Greene Naftali, New York]

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Since her student days at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in the late 1980s, when painting’s possibilities seemed all but foreclosed, Monika Baer has demonstrated a steadfast commitment to the medium’s renewal, and emerged thereafter as one of the most challenging painters of her generation. Her second solo exhibition at Greene Naftali will feature two new groups of large-format paintings and selected works on paper, moving deftly between styles and techniques—often within a single work. Trompe l’oeil matchsticks, illusionistic tree bark, mineral deposits and fragments of saw blades: the combination of these rendered and physical elements offers competing notions of painterly realism. The exhibition’s title, loose change, derives from the stray coins affixed to her watercolors’ surfaces, and reflects Baer’s deeper interest in the metaphorics of hard currency: the tender through which value circulates, changing hands and shifting form.

Monika Baer lives and works in Los Angeles and Berlin. An upcoming solo exhibition will open at the Kunsthalle Bern this fall. She was the winner of Berlin’s Hannah Höch Prize for lifetime achievement in 2019; an associated exhibition was held at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein in 2020. She has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany (2019); Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany, which traveled to Kestnergesellschaft, Hanover, Germany (both 2016); Greene Naftali, New York (2015); and Art Institute of Chicago (2013), which traveled to Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts (2014). Her work has been featured in recent group exhibitions at Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2019); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2019); mumok, Vienna (2018); WIELS, Brussels (2017); and Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2013); among others.
Her work is in the collections of the The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Museum Brandhorst, Munich; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Chicago; and Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; among others.