page_title: Marc Bauer
section_title: Style and technique
hierarchical_section_title: Marc Bauer / Work / Style and technique
caption_attribution_description: English: Marc Bauer's wall drawing that was part of the work 'Sphinx, 1931, 1935/46', 2014. Charcoal on wall. First shown in the group exhibition 'Docking Station' in the Aargauer Kunsthaus from 23 Aug 2014 – 16 Nov 2014
context_page_description: Marc Bauer is an artist best known for his works in the graphic medium, primarily drawing.
context_section_description: Bauer's graphic work is rendered almost exclusively in black-and-white, a pared-down aesthetic that seems deliberately evocative of old photographs. In scale, his graphic work varies widely, from small works on paper to large-scale images comprising several sheets pieced together, to digital prints made of blow-ups of his drawings, and even enormous wall drawings, rendered directly on the wall. Other supports for his work have included ceramic vases and coated Dibond aluminium panels.
  Bauer often produces works in series, and his exhibitions are usually conceived as site-specific installations that address the exhibition space as a larger composition. These installations frequently include a non-hierarchical arrangement of drawings – mostly unframed – pinned onto the walls, as well as drawings (often studies for the larger works) sometimes presented in specimen display cases to be viewed from above, textual accompaniments (sometimes even drawings of handwritten material such as letters), projections of earlier graphic works, objects (usually ones featured in a drawing), and large graphic murals made on the gallery's walls expressly for the show, which often add an illusionistic element to the overall display.
  Notably, Bauer's installations also often feature drawings from earlier series, and this "recycling" leads to their ongoing re-contextualization and serves to underscore long-running themes that are then presented in a new, sometimes topical light. A good example of this is Bauer's continual (possibly even anachronistic) exploration of the theme of fascism, viewed most recently from the perspective of the Gurlitt case and the Nazi's "Degenerate Art" campaign.
  Visually, Bauer's works are typically dark in tone and the contours of his figures are often blurred, through his practice of using a hard thin eraser to rub away and smear the graphite and lithographic chalk and to achieve a sense of depth. This blurring effect partly gives Bauer's drawings their distinctive "look" and also subverts the traditional concept of the line as the defining element in the art of drawing, as in some works – especially his landscapes or images of deserted cinemas and swimming pools –  the dense application and distribution of the graphite has, at first glance, a paint-like, textured appearance. This effect culminates in the technique deployed in Bauer's animated film The Architect, in which the application of an oil paint on Plexiglas is captured in thousands of stop-motion images and even becomes a narrative element in itself which propels the story forward.
  The blurring created through the repeated erasure and addition of more pencil simulates the process of remembering and forgetting that lies at the heart of Bauer's artistic endeavour, and which is encapsulated in his statement “in order to remember, you need to forget first”. The smudging of contour also echoes techniques traditionally associated with painting, such as sfumato and shows Bauer entering into a centuries-old discourse within the history of art about the possibilities of his chosen medium, contested here not necessarily against the art of painting, but against the supposed sharpness, objectivity, and dominance of the photographic image.
caption: Marc Bauer's wall drawing that was part of the work Sphinx, 1931, 1935/46, 2014. Charcoal on wall. First shown in the group exhibition Docking Station in the Aargauer Kunsthaus from 23 Aug 2014 – 16 Nov 2014
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