“In a way I seek … to understand things I don’t understand.” Marc Bauer
 Mehdi Benkler, BAK.jpg)
Marc Bauer
© Mehdi Benkler, BAK Mehdi Benkler, BAK.jpg)
Marc Bauer
© Mehdi Benkler, BAK Mehdi Benkler, BAK.jpg)
Marc Bauer
© Mehdi Benkler, BAKMarc Bauer
Jury Statement
Drawing is not only the primary medium of Marc Bauer, it is also the message. Sketch-like or hatched passages, subtle chiaroscuro, stark black and white contrasts form imagery which appears and hints at history. Imagery which follows the medium’s ambivalence: precision in the formal realisation and the circling of the imaginary. This is what makes for the specific quality of the work of Marc Bauer.
Marc Bauer (born 1975 in Geneva, lives in Zurich and Berlin)
History draughtsman. One of the most recognised Swiss artists, Marc Bauer has been creating socially and politically engaged art for more than twenty years now. He appropriates contemporary history and focuses on its dramas and excesses, in order to challenge the resulting ideology of power and human behaviours. Marc Bauer addresses these issues by creating fragmentary narrative threads in which the gaps remind us that memory is invariably selective. The artist combines personal and collective history and develops powerful narratives in which the text engages in a dialogue with the figures. Murals, animations, prints or graphite compositions applied to walls: the art of Marc Bauer is a theatre laid bare, in which mankind presents itself in its most terrifying and profound form. (JEJ)
Marc Bauer attended the École supérieure d’art visuel de Genève and the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. He has shown his works in numerous solo exhibitions in Switzerland and abroad, notably MAMCO in Geneva (2010), the Museum Folkwang in Essen (2014), the Musée Jenisch in Vevey (2016) and the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich (2019). Works by Marc Bauer are in major public and private collections, including the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen and the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco. In 2001, 2005 and 2006 he was awarded a Swiss Art Award.
