American, b. 1971

John Bauer was born in 1971 in San Diego, California, and raised in La Jolla. Surfing was a childhood passion, and he admits to having made art for as long as he can remember. At school he was an able student and he initially chose to major in Business at the University of California, Santa Barbara, subsequently switching briefly to Art History and then to a BA in Studio Art when he realised he preferred to make art rather than write about it. One of Bauer’s early interests was post-war European painting and frequent trips to Los Angeles, including a visit to the Museum of Contemporary Art’s seminal 1992 exhibition Helter Skelter, extended this to modern American art.

After graduating in 1993, Bauer returned to San Diego for nine months to work at the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art, where he was involved in installing pieces by such artists as Ed Kienholz, David Nash and Kim MacConnel.   The following year he married Ingrid Baltzer, whom he had met at college, and the couple moved to New York. Excited to be on the east coast, the locus of Abstract Expressionism, Bauer immersed himself in the cultural life of the city and established his own studio in Manhattan, above the Clementine Gallery.  Part-time employment took him to the studios of several artists, including David Lasry, an experimental print maker renowned for his collaborations with contemporary artists. At his Two Palms Press Bauer ran monoprints and editions for Sol LeWitt, Mel Bochner and Carroll Dunham,  honing techniques that would form an important motif in his own work. Another person he assisted was the painter David Reed,  whose emphasis on process and the layering of materials would also inform his practice.

In 1998 Bauer mounted his first solo show, New Oils, at the Clementine Gallery, and within a few years he was regularly exhibiting in New York and further afield. He was Visiting Artist at Pratt University, Brooklyn, and the recipient of a New York Arts Recovery Grant in 2002. His first solo show in Europe was White Out in 2007 at Gstaad in Switzerland. The following year, prompted by the birth of his son and his love of the west-coast lifestyle, he moved to Los Angeles, where he now lives and devotes all his time to painting.

Bauer describes his painting process as ‘intuitive’,  originating from a bank of images and painterly marks he has amassed into Photoshop files and templates. He begins each piece with a low-resolution computer drawing placed onto linen, layering it up over time with multiples that overlap, cancel out, pixellate, refract and recombine to create an illusory spontaneity and gestural dynamism. Likewise his hands-off application techniques – including stencilling, silk screening and spray painting – challenge the concept of originality and personal mark making in an age defined by the silicon chip.

A second group of works self-consciously derives from previous paintings. Photographed and digitised originals become the source material for maquettes, which he enlarges and screen prints. Thus the multi-layered paintings additionally become multi-generational, echoing or ghosting earlier compositions and processes, commenting on the limitless possibilities for duplication and repetition afforded by technology. This sense of infinite, merging works can be related back to Bauer’s childhood – his love of surfing and the ocean allowing an easy exploration of scale and expansiveness.

The artist’s dark palette of blacks and greys, often with metallic elements or an added cyan or magenta, initially related as much to 1980s fashion and interior design as to Abstract Expressionism. Uniting the fake-shadow gesturing of urban art with the language of abstraction, he worked on a generous scale that was almost a spoof of its own grandiosity. His early titles were extreme, provocative, offensive, taking phrases from literature that suggested the play of intimacy and distance in his art. Since 2009 many pieces have been untitled; Bauer’s recycling forms its own continuity, each work impacting and defining the next.

Bauer’s work is held in a number of public and private collections worldwide, from Norway to the United States. In 2007 and 2008 he was Visiting Artist at the New York Center for Art and Media Studies and the School of Visual Arts in New York. Selected as one of just 32 artists to exhibit at the Saatchi Gallery’s 2009 exhibition, Abstract America: New Painting and Sculpture, Bauer has also taken part in the NADA Art Fair, Miami, Florida (2006), the Armory Show, New York (2007), and Art Basel (2010). In 2013 he was a recipient of the prestigious Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, awarded to individuals of recognisable talent who have worked as artists over a significant period. Halcyon Gallery is exhibiting new works by Bauer from 10 April to 10 May 2014.