Christopher Baer & Print

The Page Bond Gallery is pleased to present Empathy: Recent Paintings by Christopher Baer and Print: Group exhibition featuring work by John Baldessari, Jim Dine, Helen Frankenthaler, Mary Heilmann, Ellsworth Kelly, Ryan McGinness, Ed Ruscha, David Shapiro, Joel Shapiro, Amy Sillman, Donald Sultan, and Peter Wuthrich, Thursday, August 27, 2015 from 6 to 8 PM. The exhibition will run August 27 to October 31, 2015.

Washington D.C. artist Christopher Baer is best known for his intuitive fusion of color field and abstract expressionism. Inspired by the likes of Helen Frankenthaler and Richard Diebenkorn, his work continually reexamines color, composition, and the material properties of paint. Baer’s second solo show at the Page Bond Gallery, Empathy, presents new paintings from his three core series: Palisades, Line Theory, and White on White. Invigorating and energetic, these paintings boast imposing dimensions, dynamic brushwork, and vibrant hues. Alternating layers of thick impasto and light washes of pigment bring the opacity and transparency of paint into focus. As a result of this layering, each canvas is at once a unified composition as well as a more complex glimpse beneath the surface, revealing previous marks, gestures, and washes of color. “Viewers who gaze at the pieces can see the story of how they were developed in addition to the composition of elements on the picture plane itself,” Baer explains. Each work has a unique progression that differentiates it, with varying degrees of subtlety, from other pieces in its series. For the viewer willing to follow this progression, Baer’s paintings encourage an enthusiastic appreciation for both the medium as well as the very process of creation.

Jim Dine entered the New York art world to great acclaim with his ‘Happenings’ and mixed media assemblages of the late 1950s and early 1960s. For artists like Dine, Robert Rauschenberg, and Claes Oldenburg, art was to be expansive and inclusive, appropriating non-art materials, embracing ordinary reality and celebrating popular culture. Although he is most often associated with American Pop Art and Neo-Dada of the 1960s, his work speaks more to a lifelong pursuit of meaning and insight. Dine is an avid printmaker. While the familiar motifs from his oeuvre—hearts, robes, tools, hands, trees, and flowers—join with new iconic elements in his prints, the medium is well suited to showcase his virtuosity and innovation. Each of these themes holds such personal significance for the artist that he refers to them as self-portraits.

Born in 1935 in Cincinnati, Ohio, Dine received a B.F.A. from Ohio University before moving to New York in 1958. His work is included in public collections throughout the world including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Tate Gallery, London; Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.