Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Währinger Straße 59, 2nd Staircase, 1st Floor, 1090 Wien
19 January - 3 March 2012. Opening on 18 January, 19h.
Works in the Exhibition
Marc Bauer (CH)
Marc Bauer was born in Geneva, lives and works in Amsterdam and Berlin. The subjects of Marc Bauer's drawings and installations are self-reflective, often mingling his personal story and memory with painful episodes of History, supported by archival photographic evidence. His work is included in a number of public collections, among them Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Kunsthaus Zürich and Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Monument (2009)
Pencil and black lithographic crayon on paper, 32 x 45 cm.
Collection of Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, acquired by Gesellschaft der Freunde bildender Kunst 2011/2012
Roman – Odessa (2009)
Pencil, colored pencil and black lithographic crayon on paper, 32cm x 45cm.
Amnezia (Club Odessa), pencil, colored crayon and black lithographic crayon on paper, 102 x 72 cm
Collection of Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, acquired by Gesellschaft der Freunde bildender Kunst 2011/2012
In a violent act of iconoclasm, Marc Bauer's black-and-white pencil drawings turn their naturalness and the representation of reality on its head. Détourned from Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, the images are alienated from themselves and their context, but also from the very idea of representation in drawings, a double alienation transforming the original forms into ghosts – empty, cold, fragmented and multiplied details. The unity of time is thus fully dissolved, taking to its consequence Eisenstein's organic dialectical montage. Marc's further estrangement of the scenes of the film from their original context confronts them to contemporary social and political issues. Weaving the narrative streams of the two series of drawings together, a research based on Eisenstein's film, drawing images from the past into today, the other following the story of Roman in today's Odessa, helps us to grasp the reality of contemporary Ukraine with its desperately oppressive conditions for living outside heteronormative expectations and representational matrix. The artist notes the dismissive comments of disillusioned Ukrainians about Eisenstein's film, as well as about the ongoing repression of gay culture there. "This movie is important for Western people, not for us. Who cares about the revolution? There is no trace of it!" The reaction of the broad masses was to dismount, together with the authorities, the monument to the sailors, and replace it with a new monument to Katharina the Great.
Monument (2009)
Pencil and black lithographic crayon on paper, 32 x 45 cm.
Collection of Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, acquired by Gesellschaft der Freunde bildender Kunst 2011/2012
Roman – Odessa (2009)
Pencil, colored pencil and black lithographic crayon on paper, 32cm x 45cm.
Collection of Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, acquired by Gesellschaft der Freunde bildender Kunst 2011/2012