The Art Institute of Chicago presents the first museum exhibition in the United States devoted to the work of Berlin-based artist Monika Baer. This presentation—on view in the Abbott Galleries (Galleries 182–184) in the museum’s Modern Wing from October 24, 2013 through January 26, 2014 includes nearly 30 paintings created between 1990 and 2013. The selection of canvases and their nonchronological groupings reflect the emphatic diversity of subject matter and the stylistic and material explorations of Baer’s practice. Often called both conceptual and performative, her paintings are simultaneously spare and sensuous, oscillating between revealing and pretending to reveal themselves.
Baer studied painting at the internationally renowned Düsseldorf Art Academy from 1985 to 1992, a time when photography had been the prevailing field of study for nearly a decade. Meanwhile, the medium of painting was decidedly male dominated in Germany, and Baer’s early work evidences that tension: she was an artist compelled to make paintings but as if without relevant models for what those paintings should be in that moment, in that place, and by her hand.