Untitled

The surreal visual world of the Berlin painter Monika Baer has an ominous character. Her visual world and style repertoire are unusual. They raise questions and provoke, and some very diverse things loom up out of thin air in large atmospheric paintings. For her iconographic repertoire, Baer takes inspiration from art history, classical mythology, Shakespeare and the traditional Japanese Noh theatre. But she also uses a personal iconography, which can barely be unravelled. In the nineties, Baer made her name with works that were characterised by abrupt changes of style. She created, respectively, 19th-century landscape scenes, 18th-century rococo interiors and 20th-century monochrome paintings with parts gouged out. From 2002, Baer increasingly placed her work within the German Romantic tradition. As such, her work occupies a remarkable and distinctive place among the new figurative trends. In her works, Baer shows how classical themes in art, such as beauty, desire, aging and mortality, were represented in the past by stereotypical images, and how strongly these rhetorical visual cues and cultural codes continue to influence the way we view (and judge) things today.