BAER, MONIKA
1964 Freiburg

Title: "10 E".
Date: 2005.
Technique: Watercolour, ash and oil on untreated cotton.
Measurement: 50 x 40cm.
Notation: Titled, signed and dated. Verso on the canvas overlap: "10 E" Baer 2005.
Frame/Pedestal: Framed.


Provenance:
- Gallery Barbara Weiss, Berlin
- Kasper König Collection, Berlin

Exhibitions:
- Kunsthalle Bern, 2021

Literature:
- Gallery Barbara Weiss/Richard Telles Fine Art (ed.): Monika Baer, Cologne 2011, p. 35, ill

Director of money
Already during her studies at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where she studied under Alfonso Hüppi, Monika Baer asked herself to what extent painting could be defined as art, according to the motto "Painting, how is that supposed to work?". Influenced by her first experiences as a young female artist in a male-dominated art scene, she developed her own visual language early on, testing the limitations of painting as a medium of art.

10 Euro
Her visual language is defined above all by a misty, light application of paint made up of nebulous layers of blue, yellow and magenta tones, from which banknotes, wine bottles, bricks, spider webs and isolated body parts emerge. Like a director, Baer has these objects, which she compares to actors in a play, repeatedly step into the spotlight of her works, only to have them disappear behind the curtain again after their appearance and in anticipation of their next performance. Baer describes the symbolic objects that she integrates into her paintings as eye-catchers and points of reference between artificially created, undefinable color space and physical reality, as so-called "eye baits"; as in her work "10 E" from 2005: "Phantasmatically, I spare myself the indirect route via a painted motif and make the money straight away," (translated) explains Baer. Baer attributes the decision to use precisely these meaningful motifs in her paintings to the visual language of unconscious dreaming, in which objects from reality with a high symbolic content also appear randomly: There does not seem to be a clear explanation for the works, despite their representational nature, and the viewer is left in a haze of pastel-colored fog without any further explanations to their unanswered questions.

Baer and König
Kasper König and Monika Baer have a long-standing relationship. Baer often participates in the Portikus exhibition series founded by König. With reference to the latter, she attracted particular attention through her "Karaoke ( Fußball-WM) - Aktion" of 1994, in which she and other artists transformed Portikus into a sports bar on the occasion of the 1990 World Cup. Her long-standing collaboration with Barbara Weiss, the renowned gallery owner and former wife of Kasper König, who played a key role in Baer's success, also underlines the connection between Baer and König.