* All prices inc. VAT, plus shipping costs
Markus Bacher: After Eight
Cat. CFA Berlin
Exhibition catalogue, edited by CFA Berlin
text (German/English) by Veit Loers
56 p with 35 coloured illustrations
320 x 325 mm, half-bound
ISBN 978-3-86442-051-1
Painting is just another way of talking
»Becoming can be emergence and decay. Bacher’s images derive their visual potential in these vicissitudes; they are fluid«, writes Veit Loers in his introductory text for the first book on Markus Bacher, who was born in 1983 in Kitzbühl, Tyrol and now lives in Vienna and Cologne, and whose abstract painting is particularly characterised by its reflection of the broad historical context. In terms of other artist positions, Markus Bacher’s abstractions – their brush stroke and then a pause as a conscious artistic act, their use of colour as the background noise for these blow-ups of graphic ideas – are based on the pictorial observations by Pierre Soulages and Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning and Cy Twombly, Günther Förg or Gerhard Richter, lastly, Albert Oehlen and Herbert Brandl. They become wrapped up local and clayey tones, engender spatial worlds in broad brush strokes, often horizontal broad layers containing fine island-like flourishes of colour in the overall motion of which that arrest the eye. »Painting is just another way of talking,« the artist says, describing the process of painting as a permanent conversation, an exchange of experiences. In spite of every possible appropriation, his work is still primarily about understanding the appearance of paint and colour as something that is not as such completely absorbed in itself. Instead there’s a permanent iridescence, and, as Veit Loers describes it, »a numinous meaning flashes to the fore, but remains suspended«; and it shines through the artist’s homeland, the Alps, and we behold lakes, moss-covered rocks, glinting stones in a mountain stream or a dark forest interior.