Robert Bauer

In Robert Bauer’s realist portraiture, sober, pensive faces cast averted downward gazes, impervious to the viewer’s eye and caught in moments of private introspection. Bauer turns to family and friends for his subjects, who appear repeatedly from multiple angles and are set against plain backdrops of white or muted tones. Bauer’s meticulously observed and finely detailed studies, rendered in oil paint on wood or graphite over gesso on paper, are drawn directly from the subject as well as from preliminary pencil studies and photographs, and have been likened to the Northern Renaissance portraiture of Hans Memling and Jan van Eyck for their muted palette and subtle brushwork and detail.