Silvia BAUER, is an Austrian artist, born in Vienna, who lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.
After several art residencies in the USA and Germany, she graduated in 2005 in sculpture at the Academy of Watermael-Boitsfort in Brussels. Since then, committed to sustainability, she has set her goal to convert the residues of our consumer world into works of art. By deliberately choosing discarded or end-of-life materials, she challenges traditional notions of value and prestige in the art world.
The sculpture that she has been creating for years is based on the physical exploration of material. Her works offer not only a visual sensation, but also a tactile one given the soft or rough touch of the surfaces. All possibilities of combination, modification and assembly are taken into consideration. Corrugated cardboard is given a velvety appearance; in its transformed state it is combined with tire fragments. Poetic installations are created with shredded car tires and eroded parts of airplane tires. There are also free forms, made with the scraps from the stage set of the Brussels Opera House, La Monnaie, which are a light-weight, basically uninteresting material, but when fashioned into sculpture command a surprising presence. During her residencies abroad other interesting materials came into use. InLuxembourg she explored configurations with construction gloves. While in China, she used industrialwaste in colored plastic, chipped porcelain, Chinese postal envelopes and fan grilles to transform them into varied works of art.
The intuition of Silvia Bauer knows no boundaries. She is constantly taking new paths, but always in harmony with her objective and her chosen basic material. Her work is always determined by the variety of materials she can find and how she can modify and thus ennoble them. Her approach is not figurative, but focused on the search for powerful, three-dimensional forms.
What motivates the artist is seeing unsuspected potentialities in the ordinary. She directs the viewer’s gaze to useless debris transformed into new life of astonishing beauty. It is important for Silvia that her pieces arouse emotions and offer the viewer new sensory experiences. She develops her own visual language in her extraordinary sculptures and installations, managing to extract from this banal matter amazing power and sensuality.
As in her sculptural work, we find the same poetry in her paintings and drawings. The artist plays with the power of emptiness and fullness. Its adventurous shapes invite us to escape;they offer us great freedom of interpretation. Her series of photographs, « trash poetry », takes us to the source of her world of recycling.