EXHIBITION

EMPEROR ME

Freymond-Guth Fine arts, Zurich, Zürich, 11/28/2015 - 01/16/2016

Limmatstrasse 270

ABOUT

EMPEROR ME. The title of Marc Bauer’s latest series of drawings is taken from a tradename for an industrial glove, the EMPEROR ME108 Heavyweight, produced by Marigold Industrial. The inspiration for the drawings, by contrast, is rather more sentimental: the two-hundred-year-old amorous correspondence, written in French and only recently published, between Johannes von Müller, custodian of the Imperial Library of Vienna, and a younger man of his acquaintance posing in the letters as a ‘Hungarian count’, with the plausibly unpronounceable name of Louis Batthyány Szent-Iványi. What do these startling opposites—the ‘Emperor of hand protection for industrial use’ and a historical case of aristocratic fraud at the dawn of the Austrian Empire—have in common? One would think very little. But in Marc Bauer’s hands they represent power, absence, and the objectification of love and desire.

 

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APT ARTISTS ON VIEW

Marc Bauer

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