Monika Baer

Monika Baer’s recent exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago – the German artist’s first survey in the United States – opens with an untitled painting from 2005. A spectral wash of translucent white paint floats at the centre of the canvas, surrounded by pours of green and black watercolour and water-washed ash running toward a depression at the centre of the picture. The painting’s ethereality makes it easy to glance over the trompe-l’œil slices of mortadella, tarnished Euro and dollar notes and the resolute gleam of coins relegated to the bottom right corner. Once seen, these nimbly painted slices of the quotidian re-route what seemed an easily digestible example of hands-off abstraction into a vexing limbo – one which the history of painting has yet to put a label on. The painterly techniques that Baer employs oscillate on the axis of the serendipitous and the hard-won, often touching on both within the same work.

In the next room, two untitled paintings from 1997 each picture a marionette of young Mozart performing at the Salzburger Marionettentheater. The first, rendered in watery turquoise, pink and saccharin pastels, poses the virtuoso at a piano decorated with painted roses. Mozart’s father looks sternly over the boy’s shoulder as he performs for a small audience. Baer’s own virtuosity as a figurative painter is undeniable, and she exercises it on Mozart and his onlookers. But as the focus vignettes around the edges, Baer fills these spaces with large amorphous shapes of colour like a contrarian and psychedelic set painting. As if playing the rebellious child – tossing off the gift of talent, much to mum and dad’s chagrin – Baer supplants her technical dexterity with whimsical, campy abstraction. In the second painting, the young pianist is centre stage, taking his bow. The obvious kitsch of the Mozart mise-en-scène, packed with belaboured metaphor, is interrupted by kitsch of a different sort: coffee shop painting. The artist seems to be posing the question: is all painting cliché?

Baer is one of a generation of artists educated at the Dusseldorf Art Academy in the late 1980s, as the paradigm of Conceptual art waned and as painting experienced the hangover of the ‘Neue Wilde’ movement, which had championed gesture and valorized macho Neo-Expressionism. Despite her conviction that the pitfalls marring painting were multiplying and despite the widely shared gloom surrounding the longevity of painting as a medium, Baer decided to set out as a painter herself. Walking through the show in Chicago, which features around 30 paintings dating from Baer’s time as a student to 2013, it is apparent that the artist is still grappling with this decision. Resultingly, her twinned skepticism and appreciation of painting is almost always played out within the same canvas.

Over time Baer stopped painting stages as literal as the Salzburger Marionettenthe­ater scenes, graduating to something more multifaceted: the sitcom, perhaps. A series of washy-blue paintings from 2008 (all Untitled, less one: Bay View) are interrupted by seams sewn down the centre of the canvas, as if the artist had taken scraps from her studio floor to a tailor. No longer trying to stuff all of her actors on the same stage, Baer, playing director, has absent-mindedly stopped panning the camera between abutting sets. Graphically painted breasts protrude from the seams, dripping milk – or is it paint? Like novice actors peeking their heads around the curtain from offstage, waiting for a cue, Baer’s cast is increasingly pictured in a state of unpreparedness – caught delivering canned lines or dropping their props into the orchestra pit. Rather than ignoring these moments of slippage, Baer has continuously engaged them. Her stagings hold transcendent moments and inspire standing ovations in spite of (or perhaps because of) the disappointments of flubs and broken artifice that she has built into each picture, like tokens of painting’s undue cachet.

If painting can act not only as theatre but also as some form of therapy then Baer is someone who has compulsively seen the same analyst for 25 years. Looking at the work she has made over this period, it becomes clear that the artist has performed an almost sublime act of countertransference: turning painting into something that is as dependent on her as she is on it.