ANTHONY BAUS: DECONSTRUCTING AND RECONSTRUCTING ARCHITECTURE AND MYTH
Anthony Baus (b. 1981) is an alumnus and former instructor at the Grand Central Atelier in New York. His unique artistic vision, which mines the worlds of antiquity and architecture as source material for contemporary issues, is expressed through an astonishing graphic facility derived from intense study of Italian Baroque drawing and painting.
His most recent drawings reimagine views of American cities—primarily New York and Chicago. He uses the historicizing architecture of these cities as a setting for narrative scenes that play out in the foreground with a cast of characters dressed in a mix of contemporary and historical styles, engaged in various activities: loading architectural fragments into or out of vans, riding electric unicycles, or otherwise going about daily life.
Anthony Baus’s drawings and paintings can be savored as intricate compositions of great beauty and finesse. They are also complex and sophisticated amalgams of the modern world and times past reflecting the artist’s love of architecture and his keen eye for the natural activity of life, rendered through an extraordinary understanding of both perspective and anatomy. However appreciated or approached, his works provide an introduction to a visionary artist of earnest intent and expansive imagination.
INTRODUCING ANTHONY BAUS : AFTER THE ANTIQUE
January 25 - February 22, 2019
The phrase “After the Antique” has two associations. The first is conventional cataloguing terminology that describes a work of art derived or copied from an ancient model or source. The second is purely chronological: “after” in time. Anthony Baus’s work meets both criteria, but his references from the ancient world are never literal; rather they are romantic, meditative, and original. His impressive technique does not reflect the mind of a copyist. The style of Old Master drawings that Baus has embraced is his preferred language of expression, but his content is entirely personal. Baus has described it as “romantically inspired narratives created on scaffolding of ancient architecture, richly imbued with symbolism and mystery.”
For the artist, the present exhibition began as a meditation on time. Months spent in Rome drew Baus into study of and contemplation on the Mithraic Mysteries, the cult religion practiced there from the 1st to the 4th centuries A.D. The characters that inform Mithraism provide the starting point for Baus’s rumination on thought and the position of man in the universe, expressed through symbolism both historical and fantastical.
