GRETL BAUER – NOTES

" Contradictory possibilities are a sign of life."

The work is both a struggle and a sanctuary.

Much of the impetus for the work is locked within my past- the landscapes which surrounded me as a child, and the subsequent years as a dancer. Early in life, I learned of the freedom, which comes of order, and the power inherent in repetition: the dancer developing through the cumulative effect of regularly repeated exercise; the beauty in the repeated grid of plowed furrow, orchard, vineyard…

Essentially the work is about stillness and light. My fields of drawn and threaded lines are distillers of light. Sometimes a dark light. (I think of the "dark meadows" of Martha Graham; the religious art of Southeast Asia – suggesting movement and possibility within great silence.)

The shards of wood, which I interweave with the threads, are found by chance. It is important that I do not alter them. They speak with a strange poetry, telling of damage and recovery, of fragility and redemption, of endurance, of passing through time. In their rawness is impacted the enigmatic history which objects have- the random laws of use, abandonment, and loss.

Like others before me, I am a seeker of "geometry and dreams, precision and enchantment". The use of the lyrical, the "persuasive power of paint" as an antitoxin against life’s harshness, is as old as man himself.

I cannot relinquish my foothold in the primitive. I borrow from it its elegance, its sense of ceremonial austerity, and its loneliness – working to redefine it for the present day. But in the first uneasy moments of this new century, we need more than ever to see that remembered light of childhood, which still passes over the world.

One needs serenity and one needs risk. Perhaps simplicity is the greatest risk.

As artists, we must provide hope that, in a complex and chaotic universe, order is also a possibility. The great joy and release of order; even if only visual, even if only for a moment.

In the face of that anxiety which we so often feel upon waking, one remembers the remark of Francis Bacon that the task of the artist is " always to deepen the mystery". Again and again we return to the basic questions. Each work becomes a step in a subtle but rigorous journey, a reaching towards that still point behind the world’s opacity where, through some unknowable force, we are mysteriously nourished and sustained.