Press Archive 1998

Gerd Bauer & Andreas Floris, Stadttheater Fürth, Fürth, Bavaria, 06.12.1998 – 20.01.1999

[Gerd Bauer]    [Andreas Floris]

Fürther Nachrichten, 1987, VOLKER DITTMAR

The absurdities of everyday life

Cartoon exhibition by Gerd Bauer and Andreas Floris - satirical views on human vanities

The visitors in the foyer of the Stadttheater currently can see a  bizarre series of pictures. Under the title "Your truth, my truth", the Art-Agency Hammond has with Gerd Bauer and Andreas Floris brought together two cartoonists that reveal with a sharp pen the insanity of life. Whereby, the in Budapest born Floris creates fantastic nightmare scenarios and the in local media much presented Gerd Bauer in comic-strip style traces the absurdities of existence.

Floris obviously is keen on the human dream of flying. His with fine lines drawn aquatint-etchings, show bizarre pilots that ride on mythical creatures through the night sky across fictional Frankish landscapes. Onto nocturnal-creatures and snails-balloons they fly or in the common role reversal mutate themselves into a propeller plane that carries white doves through the air. Equally funny as sombre are these cartoons that sometimes are reminiscent of Gothic horror scenarios with modern ingredients.

Floris also researches other types of human transport - like the skiing. With turbo drive and rear-view mirrors sweep his "slopes-foxes". That behind all hides also criticism on faith in progress, is particularly evident in the older works from the 80s. The Noah's Ark glides across a parched suburb desert. The in blatant indictment uplifting tree root or the gnarled gout hand mutated into a dead tree is memorials for the threatened nature. And man is a victim of modern life: in "Family Life" a family has mutated into television-chairs and is by the blue reflection of its own peep box frozen.

Floris sways the viewer between smiling and shivering. The dense colourfulness, the strong sense for light and shadow and the often meticulous detail lend the pictures here a very closed character, which turn them into strangely isolated scenes from a world that is faraway and yet true to life.

Evil picture stories

Gerd Bauer also satirises the human vanities. However, his pictures are not nightmarish visions like the ones by Floris, but in the most beautiful comic-style drawn little stories that keep us still smiling, even when they illustrate very angry and dramatically the perfidy of everyday life. About Christmas and the excesses of genetic research are his onto plain grey cardboard glued cartoons, from desert-pirates and sadistic cops. A cow gives BSE-alarm in the attic; the plucked Christmas goose is laid out on the white tablecloth and two police officers holding their bellies with laughter, while inspecting a stabbed clown.

Partly with speech bubbles, Bauer's drawings are as grim as apt time comments. The Bamberg-born shows, how cruel and stupid people can be, but he does not point an incriminating finger, but with a laconic scorn and even thousands of times varied slapstick-scenes, as the one with the two stone-time shooters, who shoot down a monster bird with bow and arrow getting buried by him, comes out as fresh and adorable and funny that one simply has to like it.

Bauer's draftsman ship and his kind of parody sometimes are Loriot-ish. A master of his craft, who sharply-humorous dissects with ink, felt-tip and marker the silent anguish of the creature as well as the great tragedies.