To mark the opening of Federica Schiavo Gallery’s new space in Rome, the first solo exhibition in Rome by German artist Michael Bauer (b. 1973, Erkelenz) entitled Helmeted Towards Dawn opened on 26 October.
On this occasion, the exhibition presents a nucleus of eight paintings, three large and five smaller, all created in recent years, as an elaboration of a suggestion from the past together with a series of elements linked to a present, contemporary dimension. It is precisely for this reason that the exhibition seems to set up a constant comparison (and dialogue) between the small and large works that differ not so much in the painting technique adopted, but in what they seem to communicate.
The first room opens with the works Deflated husband, armpit of the universe and blue sun (2024), on the right, and Helmeted Towards Dawn (2024), which also gives the exhibition its title, and We live in caves and tunnels (2024), both on the wall opposite the entrance. The three works, as well as the others on display, are characterised by the same painting style, already used by Bauer in previous works, characterised by a layering and juxtaposition on the canvas of different techniques such as acrylic, tempera and pastel mixed together to create a series of images that are difficult to recognise.
The first Amorphous elements, undulating lines, warm and cold colours, coloured circles are piled up on the canvas to create a constellation of landscapes that draw on both a personal sphere and external elements with a strong poetic meaning. These include, for example, the influence derived from reading – or rather, re-reading – a series of science-fiction novels very dear to Bauer as a child and taken up again in recent years, by authors such as Clark Ashton Smith, Samuel Delaney, David Bunch and above all Jack Vance’s Dying Earth, from which he extracts some phrases that he has used as titles for the works on display in the exhibition.
The firstIn the words of the artist:
“I consider the large-format works created in recent years as a kind of prequel to the smaller paintings in the exhibition. The figures that in the former sank into a vortex of entropy, now face the consequences. There is still around them the echo of the previous energy that now seems to immerse them in a slowly dissolving space. Abandoned to themselves, they wander solitary in undefined landscapes pervaded by a melancholic mood and a sense of peace”.
The dialectic that seems to emerge within the exhibition is precisely a passage from a whirling, entropic, dynamic, full dimension, clearly visible in the large-format canvases, to a more reflective, melancholic, ‘empty’ one in the small ones: the arrival, therefore, at a psychological landscape, underlined also by the change in the palette used, which from warm colours slips towards colder, darker tones. This comparison also emerges in the second and last room of the gallery, in works such as Futile Cousins, Green Shorts and Fading Sun (2024), large format, and The dawnman cried as his faced appeared on the moon (2024), small, placed side by side.
The research path pursued by Michael Bauer continues towards abstract yet veiledly figurative compositions, whose elements become recognisable only after a careful and prolonged viewing of the paintings, clearly echoing the German painting tradition. The result achieved is that of a lyrical and introspective journey, culminating in the attempt to stage the sensation of peace one feels ‘when imagining empty landscapes, the last breaths of those who inhabited them’.
Michael Bauer. Helmeted Towards Dawn, Federica Schiavo Gallery, Rome, 26.10.2024 – 25.01.2025
images: (cover 1) Michael Bauer, «Helmeted Towards Dawn», 2024, oil, acrylic, pastel on canvas (2-3) Michael Bauer. «Helmeted Towards Dawn», 2024, installation view of the exhibition at Federica Schiavo Gallery, Rome, ph. Giulia Pietroletti, courtesy of the artist and Federica Schiavo Gallery (4) Michael Bauer, «Futile Cousins, Green Shorts and Fading Sun», 2024, oil, acrylic, pastel on canvas
