THE GERMAN WORD FOR “BOTTLE”—flasche—is slang for “loser” or “wimp.” And the bottles in Monika Baer’s new paintings recently on view at Greene Naftali in New York look defeated indeed. Some lie flat, while others, though standing upright, are almost empty, ready to be discarded. Like the figures in Baer’s “Mozart paintings,” 1996–97, the bottles directly engage the viewer with a valedictory stance, as if taking a bow before an imagined audience.
It would be wrong to credit the undeniable appeal of these paintings to the stunning rendering of the bottles alone. As in her previous work, Baer uses the hyperrealism of objects as a counterpoint in an elaborate vocabulary of nonrepresentational graphemes and painted interventions: gestural washes, linear drawings, abrasions, scribbles, a cut. Shadow helps to provide a sense of depth, but any spatial illusion is thwarted by the ghostly expanses of semitransparent white that cover the rest of the paintings. As in her earlier work, Baer draws our attention to the limitations of the picture plane. By keeping the center empty and concentrating the pictorial incident near the margins—in one case arranging a bottle so that it is bisected, or “cropped,” by the painting’s edge—she activates the imaginary space outside the frame.
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