Christoph Bauer is a true Berlin art powerhouse! No wonder, Buster Keaton and Prince were the heroes of his childhood and youth. So, it’s no wonder that Christoph Bauer dedicated himself to both music and filmmaking at a very early age. At the age of five, he began classical piano training with Munich pianist and actress Anneliese Figue-Lorenz. At 17, just before participating in a youth music competition, he quit, refused to play classical music from sheet music thereafter, and instead toured with his own compositions and bands (King Ubu, Minibar, Dandy Bo & The Orchestra) through the German club scene. After jazz, pop, and funk, Bauer discovered electronic dance music for himself in the mid-1990s. Under the artist name Tétard, he was signed by the Munich label Kosmo-Records and released a series of house and techno tracks there.
Even before finishing his studies in literary sciences, he began his professional career as a freelance writer, journalist, and filmmaker, and appeared in front of the camera as an actor and TV host. As a director, in the following years, he made countless documentary films and reports and produced a series of feature films for the German and international art house cinema.
To this day, he also composes and produces the soundtracks for his own cinematic works. In the early 2000s, he moved to Berlin and began to focus more on the cinematic visualization of music and sound. German and international artists soon took notice and hired Christoph Bauer as director for their music videos – including David Bowie, Right Said Fred, Afrob, Tua, and many more. The music industry was soon followed by the advertising industry, and today Christoph Bauer works as a successful commercial director and creative producer for renowned agencies and brands (including Mercedes, Volkswagen, BMW, Ergo, Sparkasse, and many more).
The friendship and collaboration with Danish artist star Jeppe Hein eventually opened the doors to the world of media art for Christoph in 2019. For Hein’s interactive art project “Breathe With Me”, Bauer developed a series of video projections that were exhibited internationally along with Hein’s work (including Galerie König / Berlin, Moderna Museet / Stockholm, Arko Art Center / Seoul, Nordic Pavilion / Sharp el-Sheik, UN-Headquarters / New York, Hamburger Kunsthalle / Hamburg).
Jeppe Hein also encouraged Christoph Bauer to further develop his artistic forms of expression and to explore the boundaries between music and film anew. In his work with film and video fragments, which carry not only images but also the associated sounds, Christoph Bauer uses sampling and looping, actually „classic“ techniques of electronic music production and hip hop. Self-filmed material meets historical footage, news footage meets social media content.
In his live performances, Bauer creates audio-visual beats and multimedia compositions from these video snippets, which he then accompanies live on the piano. The big screen and the man at the piano in front of it – the stage setup can indeed be seen as a homage to the era of silent film pianists. However, Bauer’s performances, sounds, and visual worlds reflect the world of today – and themes that concern us all: artificial intelligence, hypermasculinity, mass consumption, and the never-ending search for love and happiness.
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