Las Vegas Weekly

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Some people paint, some people sculpt. Chris Bauder? He works in both mediums—simultaneously.

The local artist’s latest exhibit, Lush at Brett Wesley Gallery, is a collection of sculptures made almost exclusively from latex house paint. Bauder takes high-gloss ceramics—some he creates, others he finds—and then dips, drips and pours paint onto them to form obscure figures. “Ceramic isn’t prevalent in the work. Ceramic is just a tool to use while I’m getting these forms,” he says. “The paint is then modified in some way, whether it’s peeled off and inverted, squished, stuffed [or] manipulated.”

The UNLV MFA grad intended for the pieces to carry sensual overtones, something he believes is achieved by the actual forms, as well as the usage of the high-gloss paint. “It’s going to be very sexy, just the nature of the material,” Bauder says. “And the forms I tend to use have bits and pieces of sexiness and eroticism—maybe a nipple here or maybe something phallic, or there may be something vaginal or inverted or concave or convex. Basically, the pieces kind of move in a way where you’ll kind of get that from it.”