• Galerie Peter Kilchmann is pleased to announce L’Avènement, Janvier 2025, the fourth solo exhibition by Swiss artist Marc Bauer (*1975 in Geneva; lives and works in Berlin and Zurich) at the gallery. Although this is the first project by the winner of the Meret Oppenheim Prize (2020) in the gallery’s Parisian space, Bauer is no stranger to the French audience, as this will be his 12th solo exhibition in France (including the Cinerama cycle shown in the FRAC PACA (2015), Alsace, and Auvergne (2014)). This exhibition provides an opportunity for the artist to further establish his repertoire while continuing to explore unexpected forms and techniques, even for those already familiar with his work. A spectacular body of works — the exhibition includes almost thirty new pieces — including works on paper (both colored and uncolored), as well as paintings (in unexpected silhouettes), spreads across the gallery's four rooms. The space is also inhabited by artist Thomas Kuratli, aka Pyrit, who created the sound environment, ensuring a fully immersive experience for the viewer.
     
    Since the early 2000s, Bauer has developed a drawing-based practice that initially focused on paper but quickly ventured onto other surfaces (aluminum, plexiglass, etc.), gradually occupying the gallery’s walls, exploring ceramics and tapestry, and eventually expanding into animation and painting. His distinct style remains recognizable despite the diversity of medias. The lines are precise and sharp, the white spaces remain present, but color, once subtly hinted at, now assumes prominence and spreads.
     
  • In this environment, Bauer captures several portraits of men and women in their middle years. It is not so much a reflection of a particular lifestyle that drives the ambiguity, but rather the sense that these figures are caught in a vast vulnerability. The delicacy of the pencil strokes touches on downcast, almost internalized gazes, lips closed when words fail, hands hidden in pockets or left hanging limply, no longer caressing a face or encircling a lowered shoulder. These unobjectified figures surrender to the intimacy of familiar, safe interiors, where, despite the comfort, there is a weight of a world outside pressing in. This melancholy is not staged. The figures are genuinely absorbed by the mourning of a reality that refuses to bend to their hopes and desires. Both the viewer and the artist observe, sometimes from the corner of the eye, from behind glass, and are sometimes invited to step into the space, to remember the carefree freedom of coming and going. Here, the use of erasure, those zones of white, of bare paper, becomes hypnotic. These spaces, where the absence of image first questions, then stuns, and ultimately captures the eye, certainly play a new role in the artist’s vocabulary, where they have long served as a powerful evocation of memory’s gaps. These spaces are not of nothingness but of boundaries, places of transition. They are neutral zones where the realities of the figures and those of the viewers could overlap, ensuring the renewal of the gaze and the persistence of a disenchanted image that one does not tire of observing, as it continues to be something to heal and reinvent.
  • To avoid awakening the beast, this hushed, numb atmosphere slumbers in the two works: L’Avènement, January 2025 I and II (pencil on paper, each 140 x 100 cm). A low-angle view of the French garden at Vaux-le-Vicomte, in shades of gray, overlooks a salon. The sofa, on the other hand, is viewed from eye-level. These choices of perspectives are not accidental; they allow the viewer to understand that they are both above the dream and spying on reality. An adolescent figure, which could seem detached from the previous works, relaxes into the softness of the cushions, slipping out of the frame at a second glance. The architectural elements, so prevalent in Bauer’s work, dissolve in this new body of work. However, the garden, with the rigidity / rationality / effectiveness of its design, becomes architecture in itself, a space where culture imposes itself on nature. Its symmetry also recalls certain earlier works exhibited in The Default Brain (Gallery Peter Kilchmann, 2022), where colored Rorschach forms crowned sleeping boys. The circular motifs, borrowing from Art Nouveau, evoke the organic flowers of Georgia O’Keeffe. Flowers that are vulvas, gardens that become architecture, dreams that function as extensions of reality. Because ultimately, here lies the subject, what surprises and questions: this time fails to flow simultaneously in both the real and the dream. The dream is frozen, paused, an image without movement or promise. And where the dream no longer conveys the comfort of reality, where it is no longer an absolute space of freedom but an embodiment of manic and systemic control, a glass tipped over on the table tells the urgency of destruction, of subverting the orderly.
  • Echoes from 1934… A 45-year-old doctor: "I live at the bottom of the sea to remain invisible after the public opening of the apartments." A schoolgirl: "I get all my homework, all my reports, with the note 'very good but unsatisfactory because hostile to the state.'" A young man: "I dream that I no longer dream except of squares, circles, and octagons that all resemble Christmas cakes, because dreaming is forbidden." Already introduced in his solo exhibition at the Swiss Cultural Center (The Collector, 2012), a new series of works on paper (pencil and lithographic crayon on paper, each 30 x 42 cm) continues to depict testimonies of dreams under occupation. More energetic, the lines are sharp, and the blacks are deep, almost scrawled or crossed out. The gesture is frantic, reflecting the confused feelings of those who are caught in the states of surveillance and oppression.
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  • A series of mosaic drawings, Les résistantes (pencil and colored pencils on paper, each 45 cm in diameter), extends a vocabulary Bauer began developing during his residency at the Menil Collection (Houston, USA, 2023-2024). Hilde Meisel, aka Hilda Monte, Jeanine Morisse-Messerli, Libertas Schulze-Boysen, Simone Michel-Lévy, Liselotte Herrmann, Sophie Scholl: these six French and German women all lost their lives during World War II for their resistance activities. Their meticulously drawn portraits can only be appreciated up close, and in Bauer’s insistence on provoking a physical closeness with these faces, a sincere affection emerges, shaded by profound respect and immense admiration. Elaborate mandalas in vivid colors surround these figures. It would be misguided to think of them as merely ornamental. Certainly, the ornate arabesques serve to beautify these harsh images, but the purpose of such an exercise is to place these figures in an elastic temporality: first, in the slowness of their creation, which is repetitive and almost meditative; then, allegorically, in the care given to these images, which reactivates their memory; and finally, in the calm contemplation of them. Thus magnified, the resilient viewer spends more time near these icons, ensuring that such struggles are not consumed by a forgetful memory.
  • Marc Bauer, Hilde Meisel Alias Hilda Monte, Les Résistantes, 2024 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Marc Bauer, Jeanine Morisse-Messerli, Les Résistantes, 2024 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Marc Bauer, Libertas Schulze-Boysen, Les Résistantes, 2024 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Marc Bauer, Simone Michel-Lévy, Les Résistantes, 2024 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Marc Bauer, Liselotte Herrmann, Les Résistantes, 2024 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Marc Bauer, Sophie Scholl, Les Résistantes, 2024 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Marc Bauer, Hilde Meisel Alias Hilda Monte, Les Résistantes, 2024
  • Inspired by the film L’Ambassade (Chris Marker, 1973), a series of dawns in three oil paintings on wood panels (including...
    Inspired by the film L’Ambassade (Chris Marker, 1973), a series of dawns in three oil paintings on wood panels (including...
    Inspired by the film L’Ambassade (Chris Marker, 1973), a series of dawns in three oil paintings on wood panels (including...
    Inspired by the film L’Ambassade (Chris Marker, 1973), a series of dawns in three oil paintings on wood panels (including...
    Inspired by the film L’Ambassade (Chris Marker, 1973), a series of dawns in three oil paintings on wood panels (including 2 triptychs 180 x 460 cm and 140 x 70 cm) transforms one of the gallery rooms. The short film unfolds in a closed setting after a coup d'état, blurring the boundaries between documentary and fiction. The daily lives of political refugees and the couple of ambassadors who host them form the core of the director's initiative. The voiceover says, "The past is like a foreigner; it is not a matter of distance, but the crossing of a border." This quote is entirely appropriate when reflecting on Bauer's career, as his works can only be understood considering multiple influences and inspirations. Drawing from a vast cultural, social, and political history, his works are to be approached both individually, as part of larger sets, and through shifting, surprising connections that require collecting from the tragic memories of the past to observe signs of very real threats. The final images of the film reveal a panoramic view of Paris, which the artist has reinterpreted on two panels with baroque lines similar to those of Cy Twombly, which Bauer discovered at the Menil Collection (Houston, USA). The view, quite muted in Chris Marker’s film, is bathed in brilliant colors in Bauer’s works. Aube Jour 1, Paris and Aube Jour 7, Paris open and close this series. The horizon, though blurred, as though seen through a fogged-up window, stretches across a sky so warm it seems on fire. The lacquered, deep colors, both brushed and fluid, confer an apocalyptic dimension to this breathtakingly beautiful vision. As if this vast sky, observed systematically every day of the same week at twilight, secretly carries all possibilities.
  • Marc Bauer studied at the École supérieure d'arts visuels in Geneva and the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. His...
    Marc Bauer studied at the École supérieure d'arts visuels in Geneva and the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. His work has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions, including at the Menil Collection (USA, 2023-2024), Berlinische Galerie (Germany), Istituto Svizzero (Italy), Drawing Room (UK), Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Centre Culturel Suisse (France, 2012), and several FRACs (France). His group exhibitions include the Kunsthalle Zürich (2023), the 21st Biennale of Sydney (2018), the Centre Pompidou Paris (2017), and the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich (2016). He is the recipient of the prestigious Meret Oppenheim Prize (2020) and GASAG Prize (2020). Marc Bauer is also a permanent faculty member at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHDK) in Switzerland.
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