Monica De Cardenas Gallery in Zuoz is pleased to announce the first exhibition in Switzerland by German painter Abel Auer.

Abel Auer’s paintings and drawings are often framed by arabesque-like ornamental motifs. Executed meticulously in Indian ink or with a brush, these motifs not only form an elaborate border around the image, but are also recurrent elements in the artist’s figurative repertory that possesses a narrative depth imbued with mystery. Auer’s iconographic universe is imprinted on the landscape – mountains, coniferous forests, rocks, plant forms. Figures and architecture also appear, however, and their surreal quality places his painting in the dimension of a timeless present, while often creating a feeling of visionary rapture.

Echoes of Romantic art are to be found in Auer’s works, along with citations of other painters – like the Belgian James Ensor – manifold references to popular culture and allusions to fantastic cinema, the comic-strip repertoire and sci-fi novels.

Auer has chosen to take a critical distance from those artistic schools advocating objectification or a pseudo-theoretical approach. He creates alternative worlds whose wholeness and beauty “function” in a completely autonomous way. Post-modern criticism, humour and irony overlap against a background of melancholy playfulness, in a graphic and pictorial output that also seems linked to writers such as Charles Baudelaire or Edgar Allan Poe.

Abel Auer attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg at the end of the 1990s and was one of the founders of the Akademie Isotrop group consisting of 20 young artists (1996–2000). During the last ten years he has Auer exhibited in many international galleries, this year at the Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, in 2009 at Künstlerverein Malkasten, Düsseldorf and at the Museé d’Art Contemporain in Bordeaux.

Abel Auer was born in Munich in 1974, attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg at the end of the 1990s and currently lives in Bruxelles. He has participated in exhibitions worldwide, including at the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University, Kansas; Tommaso Corvi Mora Gallery, London; Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo; Tiroler Künstlerschaft, Innsbruck; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; Le Consortium, Dijon, France; Centre Cultural Andratx, Mallorca, Spain; Velada Santa Lucía, Venezuela; Kunsthaus Hamburg, Germany; Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany; PS1 MoMA, New York; Künstlerverein Malkasten, Düsseldorf; Museé d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux and Shirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt.

Heiko Klaas and Nicole Büsing