“Light fascinates me in all its manifestations. I study, experiment, discover, and try to give form to light and set it into motion.” (Werner Bauer)
Werner Bauer (*1934) has dedicated the whole of his artistic production to the declension of light and to enriching the discipline of concrete art with new visual and material dimensions. MUSEUM RITTER pays tribute to an outstanding exponent of Light Art and presents a broad overview of this artist from Saarland.
After his early years working with representational motifs, since the 1960s Werner Bauer has produced a broad and impressive body of work informed by the ABC of geometrical abstractionism. Alongside early works done in wood, the exhibition also presents Bauer’s interim period, when he worked with ground and polished Perspex forms, his cycle of works using silicone as a light carrier, and his recent group of works using foils that collect and conduct light.
Characteristic of Werner Bauer is his love of experimentation and his tireless search for new materials, which for him are always the starting point for the creative process. Straddling as he does art and technology, time and again he has discovered industrially manufactured materials with hidden aesthetic potential. Since the early 1990s Bauer has explored and worked with novel synthetic foils (LISA foil, acrylic foils, and OLF film) that either compress the incoming light or split it and send it in two directions. Werner Bauer creates his visual structures with enormous care and craftsmanly precision, to give immaterial and formless light a concrete and malleable form. In this way he has created fascinating optical effects that not only baffle the beholder, but also change with the viewer’s own movement.
The exhibition consists of around 70 works that amount to a representative overview of this internationally renowned Light Artist’s creative output.
Accompanying publication:
Werner Bauer, lux, lucis … Deklinationen des Lichts.
German-English catalogue, Verlag Das Wunderhorn, 2008
Integrated into the book jacket is an original OLF light object.
Price € 24.80