Since her student days at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in the late 1980s, when painting’s possibilities seemed all but foreclosed, Monika Baer has demonstrated a steadfast commitment to the medium’s renewal—and emerged thereafter as one of the most challenging painters of her generation. Her practice brings disparate visual traditions into productive conflict, moving deftly between styles and techniques—often within a single work. Trompe l'oeil liquor bottles, illusionistic brick walls, mineral deposits and fragments of saw blades: the combination of these rendered and physical elements offers competing notions of painterly realism.

Baer conceives of the canvas as a theater of objects, “a site of staging or performance”—an approach that began with early depictions of marionettes and extends to her treatment of space. The loose atmospherics of her painted backdrops can play host to a range of protagonists, from cartoon breasts to coins or chains, cigarettes to sliced sausages. As Alex Kitnick wrote in the catalogue that accompanied Baer’s solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, her work’s barbed wit is animated by “the tension between narrativity and stasis . . . Baer’s paintings suggest stories happening just outside them while also insisting on a dense and internal resistance to such readings.” Often working in serial fashion with recurring motifs that surge and multiply, Baer figures the psyche of painting itself as both vital and unresolved. “I move between skepticism and commitment, testing and engaging,” the artist has said. “If a painting affirms itself, I am not interested.”