Art in America
Michael Bauer
October 2014
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.