Schweine Steine Scherben

Greene Naftali is delighted to present its third solo show with Monika Baer, whose disarming subversions of her chosen medium have made her one of the most challenging painters working today. The exhibition features a new suite of paintings that inhabit tropes of modernism—from the monochrome to the graffiti-like scrawls that connote raw impulse and liberatory energy. Here trompe l'oeil brick walls are largely covered (or subsumed) by textured zones of spackled grit, incised with crude line drawings stained with washes of lavender that settle into each ridge and furrow. Layering both illusionistic and brute indexical marks, profane motifs and delicate hues, Baer stages painting as a receptive surface for the obscenities of our times. Monika Baer lives and works in the Black Forest in Germany. Key solo exhibitions include Trautwein Herleth, Berlin (2023); Kunsthalle Bern (2021); Greene Naftali, New York (2021, 2015); Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (2020); Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany (2019); Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany, which traveled to Kestnergesellschaft, Hanover, Germany (both 2016); and Art Institute of Chicago (2013), which traveled to Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts (2014). Her work has been featured in recent group exhibitions at the Kunstmuseum Bern (2025); Kunstmuseum Basel (2022); Fondazione Prada, Milan (2021); Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2019); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2019); mumok, Vienna (2018); Wiels, Brussels (2017); and Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2013); among others. Baer received Berlin's Hannah Höch Prize for lifetime achievement in 2019. Her work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Museum Brandhorst, Munich; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; University of Chicago Booth School of Business; and Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, among others