Perry Rubenstein Gallery is pleased to announce an upcoming exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist John Bauer. The occasion will mark his first exhibition with the gallery, as well as his first solo presentation in Los Angeles.

Bauer’s work destabilizes our understanding of abstract painting by questioning its authorship, authenticity and process. Drawing from the combined histories of Abstract Expressionism, Pop and post-war German painting, Bauer subjects images to processes inherent to abstract painting, including stenciling, spraying, rolling, brushing and printing. He derives authentic marks from small gestural studies, which are then photographed, scanned and recombined to create hybrid forms that are layered on canvas. Information is physically applied and then cancelled, deleted, shifted, mirrored and overwritten on itself, placing the onus of the meaning on the manipulation of the medium. By employing a series of mediated techniques, his practice debunks the historically existential meaning of mark making by creating a collision between gesture, material and technological processes.

Raised in La Jolla, California, Bauer’s immersion in surf culture and its emphasis on surface and style cultivated his interest in both the identifiable and mysterious distinctions between the native and the visitor, the real and the fake. His paintings create a forum for the deliberate collapse of the two; in some, new compositions are created under traditional painterly circumstances, where layered marks are made in dialogue with others as they appear on canvas. Others act as ghosts or afterimages, screen-printed from collages derived from digital images of past compositions. As such, the paintings uniquely riff off one another in a sensorial exchange that is heightened when the works are installed together and deepened when experienced individually.

The title of Bauer’s exhibition at Perry Rubenstein Gallery, Black and Blue, overtly refers to the color palette of the works shown. Further, it functions to subjectively draw attention to the underlying subtext of violence as well as the aftereffect of a physical fight, which frames Bauer’s conceptual and process-oriented aesthetic methodologies. The black and silver palette that has characterized Bauer’s work for the last decade provides the viewer entry into his series of Cutpaste Mirror paintings, which through a change in the ground from black to chrome, creates a vampiric effect for the viewer; the surfaces are bright enough to reflect ambient light, but not reflective enough to see one’s shadow. Afterimage of Angel of Light, one of the exhibition’s largest blue-based works, is created from a 100-layer digitally collaged composite of a photograph of a previous work, Angel of Light, a prime example of the way in which Bauer’s works inhabit a slippery position in a netherworld of existence between the original and the stand-in, and question the irreproducible nature of reproduction.

John Bauer (b. San Diego, 1971) lives and works in Los Angeles. His work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions at international galleries and institutions, and is a 2013 recipient of the prestigious Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.

Perry Rubenstein Gallery
1215 N. Highland Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90038
Tel. +1 (323) 4641097
info@perryrubenstein.com
www.perryrubenstein.com

Opening hours
Tuesday - Saturday
From 10am to 6pm

Related images: 

  1. Cutpaste Mirror 2, 2013, oil and enamel on linen, 57 x 45 inches
  2. Untitled, 2013, oil and enamel on linen, 20 x 16 inches
  3. Cutpaste Mirror 1, 2013, oil and enamel on linen, 60 x 48 inches
  4. Untitled, 2010-2012, oil and enamel on linen, 94.5 x 80.75 inches
  5. Untitled, 2010-2012, oil and enamel on linen, 80.75 x 64.9 inches
  6. Kill Yourself 2nd version, 2012-2013, oil and enamel on linen, 98.5 x 78.75 inches

All images Courtesy of Perry Rubenstein Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo credit: Fredrik Nelson.