Quasar II Limited Edition Print

5 Payments Acrylic on canvas

To You Blue Limited Edition Print

Spatium, Fasson und Zeit Acrylic on canvas

Robert Bader
Painter (Barossa Valley, SA)

Robert Bader comes from a stable of artists. His mother was a photographic assistant and his father was a musician, while his grandfather was a painter and violinmaker in Germany. Further, his mother’s cousin, Herbert Bayer was a famous Bauhaus artist working with Kandinsky and two of his relatives from the 18th century were ceramic painters. This German heritage is reflected in his hardedge “Neo-Geo” style.

By the age of 14, Bader had experimented with drawing, watercolour, oils, screen printing, design, wood carving and marquetry, while teaching himself to play guitar. Two years later at the suggestion of a close family friend, he began exhibiting at a local art gallery where he sold his first two pieces of work. At the age of 17, he participated in and demonstrated at a weekend workshop near Campbelltown on a five acre artist’s retreat alongside ceramic potters.

Studying art and technical drawing throughout his years at high school, one of his art teachers made him aware of the optical art works of Bridget Riley, Victor Vasarely and Josef Albers. At the same time, his brother in law Rainer Linz (composer and performance artist working alongside Stellarc) analyzed one of Bader’s paintings and showed him a different way of looking at the world around him. This, together with the influence of his art teacher had a profound affect on his later work. However, this also caused Bader to be torn between his love of painting and his love of object design, art versus craft, resulting in his refusal to create any object design for a period of ten years.

While studying for his Bachelor degree at Sydney College of the Arts, he dogmatically opposed Abstract Expressionist influences and continued on a path of hard-edge colourist theories, privately reading original documents from the Bauhaus artists and espousing the colour theories of Joseph Albers. When he completed his art degree, his wish to lead the life of an artist had to unfortunately be balanced for a need to earn a regular income, culminating in his completion of a Diploma in Education, allowing him to teach. During the next 12 years that he taught school students and adult master classes, his determination to one day be a full time artist, allowed him to continue painting at least five hours a day.

While Bader studied at the Sydney College of the Arts, he also pursued his other major passion of sound and music under the direction of David Ahern. He composed various pieces including Electronic Gong 1981 and Piece for Electronics 1981, which was performed at the Environmental Festival in Rimini, Italy. Many of his pieces included raw material that was fed into a tape recorder and manipulated. These soundscapes were then recorded onto paper as a manuscript. Here, the original influence of Rainer Linz was obvious.

Bader believes that an artist should be thought provoking, “If the artist can not make the viewer question and think about issues, then he has achieved very little.” His early paintings such as Where Opposites Meet 1981, exhibited in 1985 and Electromagnetic Energy Units 02 1981 relate to his obvious interest in architectonics and physics. The human form began to enter into his painting in 1984 with the black and white ink drawing On your Marks, Get Set, Go, leading to large canvases such as Leanne, you Curvilinear Form 1990. In this powerfully bright work, Bader has reduced the figurative form to several orange curves, which are overlaid with many bright facets red in varying tonality. Each facet is meant to represent another energy unit. By the 1990’s, his hard-edge figurative works entered a world of humour which can be seen in The Perfect Body for 5 payments of $49.95 2000. More recently, his works on paper and canvas paintings have had their basis in a world of non-objective abstraction. He has participated in many group and solo exhibitions in Sydney, Canberra, Adelaide, Melbourne and overseas.

Robert Bader is represented in the publication Artists and Galleries of Australia and has also made guest appearances on the radio shows State of the Arts 5UV and Sunday Arts BBB-FM. Bader continues to paint at his studio in the Barossa Valley exploring the use of new technology as a medium. He has been invited to partake in an Artist in Residence program in the USA during 2005-6. Bader’s work is available through A.M. Galleries – Barossa Valley, with delivery possible worldwide.

Contact Robert Bader