Michael Bauer

West Hollywood’s Nino Mier Gallery is the next art space to launch an online viewing room to support its entire roster of artists. Aptly titled “PAPER (and one on wood),” the digital presentation largely features works on paper with the exception of one piece on wood by both local and international artists.

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To no one's surprise, Susan and Michael Hort, the New York-based art patrons and philanthropists, are at it again—this time, making the rounds at Art Los Angeles Contemporary and attending the Rema Hort Mann Foundation benefit at Mihai Nicodim Gallery. Here, in their own words and photographs, they tell us about their favorite works. 

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All the paintings in Michael Bauer's second solo exhibition at Lisa Cooley have a similar composition: a central mass of miscellaneous marks and symbols that scatters like shrapnel toward the edges. The 11-footwide Creme Wars—Snoopie (2014), the show's title work, suggests a form of contemporary history painting. The buff-colored ground is packed with distorted body parts (often hyperactive fingers), floating geometric slabs, ghostly nebulae and oozing drips. 

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Michael Bauer at Lisa Cooley Gallery, through June 22 Bauer is a German artist living in New York, and he wears his native country’s influences on his sleeve (the ghost of Martin Kippenberger floats fairly close by). Pondering the large-scale paintings here, an odd assortment of other artists also came to mind — among them Sue Williams, Trenton Doyle Hancock, and Kati Heck.

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All of modern painting seems to be contained in the clusters of scribbles, swaths of impastoed oil, half-finished figures, Pop art foodstuffs, and squiggly stray limbs that float around the center of each of Bauer’s paintings. René Magritte and Sue Williams seem especially prominent in the German-born, New York-based artist’s constellation of influences in these new pieces, which are among his biggest and funniest to date.

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