Markus Bacher | River Deep Mountain High | Contemporary Fine Arts | 15.01.-05.03.2016

It is the third solo exhibition with the Los Angeles based artist Markus Bacher (b. 1983, Kitzbühel, Austria).

Markus Bacher’s new, large format works have been made up of two or more panels for some time. This intervention grants a formal caesura to the organic character of the paintings, which do not distinguish themselves between abstraction and figuration, but rather allowed the two directions to emerge from one another.

The discussion with landscape, from which many of Bacher’s paintings have been influenced, seem to no longer only confine themselves to the natural – “River Deep Mountain High”. One is tempted to also see the oversized billboards of his newly chosen home, Los Angeles as an influence, along with generations of Californian artists, for whom they were also of inspiration. But, as Veit Loers asserted, Bacher’s “painting is too idiosyncratic, to be reduced to influences”, this originality is socialised in a European tradition of informality.

Bacher, the painter of “woven coloured fantasies” (Loers) says, that “Painting is another form of speech”, so it is his speech that has become even more complex, but above all louder and dirtier:

Markus Bacher, studied at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. He has had solo exhibitions at the Museum Stiegenhaus, Langenlois, Austria; the Galerie Goldener Engl, Hall in Tirol, Austria; and Susanne Vielmetter in Los Angeles, USA. Group exhibitions include the Biennale Giovani Monza, Serrone della Villa Reale Monza, Italy; Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum, Innsbruck, Austria; Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck, Austria; Fritz-Schramma Halle, Cologne; and the Essl Museum, Klosterneuburg, Austria.