In 2014, Robert Bauer and Bronlyn Jones had a two-person exhibition with the gallery. Eleven years later, Krakow Witkin Gallery now presents a solo exhibition of Bauer’s small landscapes in tempera and gouache, painted over the past five years.

“These are like conjured memories … If they were only about depiction they’d be insufficient. It’s their retraction from facts that makes them about the persistence of vision,” writes William Jaeger about Bauer’s work that was included in a 2017 exhibition at Skidmore College’s Schick Art Gallery.

Bauer paints with a keen attention to subtle detail through an exploration where he employs pencil notes, photographs, studies of other works, sometimes of the same subject, and also more abstract memories of time and place. Consistent with this layering is the artist’s process of addition and subtraction. Bauer adds brushstrokes in a slow and steady manner but just as carefully, he sands or washes the painted surface so as to embed, subdue, or remove paint. The layering of sources and processes results in a balance of chance, choice, and control.

Poet and critic John Yau writes, “The reticence of Bauer’s paintings mixed with his sensitivity to tonality and light suggests that he slows time down in order to register its passing.”

Robert Bauer was born in Iowa in 1942 and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. He moved to Boston in 1985 and currently lives in midcoast Maine. Bauer’s work has been included in exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, CT, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York and Pratt Institute’s Manhattan Gallery. He is the recipient of three Massachusetts Cultural Council grants, two Pollock-Krasner Foundation grants in Painting, and he was a finalist in the 2006 Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. Bauer’s work is represented in public and private collections throughout the United States, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Harvard Art Museums.