Name: Frank Bauer | Fischgrätparkett und andere Probleme
Start: 2024-09-27T19:00:00+02:00
End: 2024-09-27T22:00:00+02:00
Location: Mühlengasse 3, Düsseldorf

$Frank Bauer | Fischgr\u00e4tparkett und andere Probleme$

The exhibition is on view until Nov 9, 2024.
Frank Bauer's latest work was inspired by David Hockney's famous painting ‘Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy’. He was fascinated by the tension between the naturalistic depiction and the highly artificial staging of the painting. He was particularly impressed by the static arrangement of the figures, which contrasts with a fleeting snapshot. This awakened in him the desire to create similar double portraits. Unlike his earlier works, which were mostly based on unplanned, spontaneous photos, Bauer changed his approach this time. The templates for his new paintings were created in long photo sessions in which the portrayed actively participated in the process. They helped choose the final motif and decided how much the picture should say about them-selves. Some incorporated personal objects into the portrait, while others omitted such details. In these sessions, the artist con-sciously saw himself as a neutral observer who left it up to the people to portray them-selves. He deliberately refrained from im-posing a preconceived image composition on his subjects. A central aim was to avoid the impression of a snapshot in order to create a connection to classic portraits. At the same time, Frank Bauer played with the formal elements of Hockney's work wherever possible - for example, by positioning the figures in front of a window. The significance of portraits has changed considerably over time. Today, countless portraits are taken with mobile phones and immediately shared online. But when Frank Bauer digitised his grandmother's old photo albums, he noticed the big difference to the photography of earlier times. Back then, photographs were carefully staged, posed and sometimes stiff, but they laid claim to per-manence. According to Bauer, a painted portrait carries this claim even more strongly - even if the model was only a simple mobile phone photo. Whether painted portraits are still contem-porary today remains an open question for him. But he refers to the painter Gerhard Richter, who said: ‘People always paint.’ In this sense, he sees each of his portraits as an exploration of the question of what painting can mean today.