{"id":10244,"date":"2017-10-29T20:09:59","date_gmt":"2017-10-29T20:09:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/susebauer.net\/wordpress\/?page_id=10244"},"modified":"2022-01-05T09:45:07","modified_gmt":"2022-01-05T09:45:07","slug":"artforum","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/susebauer.net\/wordpress\/artforum\/","title":{"rendered":"Artforum"},"content":{"rendered":"

2012 Suse Bauer – Galerie im Marstall Ahrensburg
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Suse Bauer\u2019s work is characterized by apparently contradictory themes and stylistic tendencies. It is rooted in abstraction and characterized by planar arrangements and artless ornament, containing references to Bauhaus modernism and literary quotations while reflecting Bauer\u2019s pronounced penchant for bricolage and the handmade. Her exhibition \u201cDer Abgrund unter mir hei\u00dft Zukunft\u201d (The Abyss Beneath Me Is Called Future) included six paintings (oil or oil and oil pastel on paper), a floor sculpture in cast concrete (Untitled, 2018), four large-format black-and-white scans and\u2014as the show\u2019s epicenter, as it were\u2014a complex installation on the floor encompassing blue yoga mats with countless penny-size punched holes and scattered ceramic objects (also Untitled, 2018). At its far end, a screen rose to the ceiling, a lattice of wood strips stained a reddish brown (Untitled, 2018); mounted on it were the ceramic reliefs In den K\u00fcnstlerkolonien (In the Artist Colonies), 2017, Meine Frauengruppe (My Women\u2019s Group), 2016, and Ausgeschlossen, Wiedereintritt (Excluded, Reentry), 2018. Loosely distributed across an airy eighteen-by-twelve grid of square fields, the arrangement read as a formal echo of the compositional principles underlying the artist\u2019s paintings, translating them into three dimensions.
\nDeliberately integrating the formal idioms of visionary modernism into paintings such as Neue Pl\u00e4ne (New Plans), 2018; Sie gehorcht der Materie um sie beugen zu k\u00f6nnen (She Obeys Matter so as to Bend It), 2011; and the titular Der Abgrund unter mir hei\u00dft Zukunft, 2018, the artist homes in on instants of ambivalence: She pinpoints formerly utopian elements that are now perhaps no more than vacuous ornamental shells and reinterprets their emptiness as containing at least a projective power\u2014the seeds of a kind of para-modernist visual language in which abstract forms become what she calls \u201csemantic vessels\u201d for the adumbration of new meaning.
\nTitling her show after a quotation from the Traumtexte (dream texts) of the dramatist and poet Heiner M\u00fcller, Bauer translated its simile of a free-floating bird\u2019s-eye view of the future\u2014a gaze that is quite literally abstract\u2014into a play with vertical visual axes: The flatness of her paintings and ceramics, of the installation on the floor and the concrete sculpture, offered itself to the kind of top-down contemplation that is still a fairly novel perceptual mode and yet one we have all learned and internalized thanks to Google Maps, drone footage, and the like. This aspect was most salient in the four large scans in the series \u201cLandschaft unter Aufsicht\u201d (Landscape Under Surveillance), 2018. The imagery is reminiscent of satellite photographs or aerial shots of archaeological excavation sites, but at the same time it is abstract.
\nThese works in fact originate in reliefs Bauer modeled in wet clay. Rather than photographing them, she reproduced them by turning a flatbed scanner on its head and mounting it above the object. This process produces various distortions and makes areas close to the scanner\u2019s platen glass pin-sharp while others are slightly blurred\u2014creating a specific pictorial space that manifests itself to great effect in the drastically enlarged prints. Hand-kneaded, punched, or knife-cut fragmentary shapes form archaic ensembles or, as in Landschaft unter Aufsicht (Reservat) (Landscape Under Surveillance [Reservation]), 2018, plateaus with inundated areas that, depending on the imagined scale, might be puddles or lakes. The gaze from above harbors the utopian idea of an archaeology of the future and engenders abstractions of a profound beauty, at once alien and familiar.
\nTranslated from German by Gerrit Jackson.<\/em><\/p>\n

(Jens Asthoff)<\/p>\n

2010 Suse Bauer – Galerie Conradi<\/strong><\/p>\n

Suse Bauer evolves an abstraction of ornate constructivism. This may seem a contradiction, given that constructivist approaches pursue a formal logic of the image, one that does not dwell on the decorative. With her work, however, Bauer moves directly into this contradiction. In often small, though sometimes very large, formats, she combines color fields, lines, and abstract figures in two-dimensional compositions that are as archaic as they are artificial. One might think of modern as well as abstract, utopian public art as it once flourished in East Germany (where the artist lived as a child).
\nBauer takes on such associations with the titles of her work, such as Erste Verk\u00fcndung der symbolhaften Anleitung zur Gestaltung der Welt (First Proclamation of the Symbolic Formula for the Design of the World) or Die Ingenieurin (The Engineer), both 2009. She makes no direct citations in her paintings, but instead gathers forms, colors, and concepts intuitively and assembles them in varied compositions. Mostly rendered in thick oil pencil on paper, the clearly contoured fields of sharply contrasted color seem homogenous at first, but on closer inspection the surfaces appear specifically articulated: Fine strokes reveal the arc of her pencil\u2019s movement, while monochrome surfaces incorporate multiple shades and produce a subtle vibration of hue.
\nBauer creates patterns that emerge via a piecemeal method. Alles was von mir Ich genannt wird (All of Me That Is Called I), 2010, for instance, comprises just a few elements. Against an intense vermilion plane, a jagged bronze cross emphasizes the diagonal and separates a reverse-L-shaped angle on the left from two vertically converging circles on the right. Here, Bauer condenses a spare formal vocabulary into an image of the stylized, enigmatic sublime.<\/p>\n

Translated from German by Diana Reese.<\/em>
\n(Jens Asthoff)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

2012 Suse Bauer – Galerie im Marstall Ahrensburg Suse Bauer\u2019s work is characterized by apparently contradictory themes and stylistic tendencies. It is rooted in abstraction and characterized by planar arrangements and artless ornament, containing references to Bauhaus modernism and literary quotations while reflecting Bauer\u2019s pronounced penchant for bricolage and the handmade. Her exhibition \u201cDer Abgrund unter mir hei\u00dft Zukunft\u201d (The Abyss Beneath Me Is Called Future) included six paintings (oil…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/susebauer.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/10244"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/susebauer.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/susebauer.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/susebauer.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/susebauer.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10244"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/susebauer.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/10244\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10618,"href":"http:\/\/susebauer.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/10244\/revisions\/10618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/susebauer.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}