And solo exhibitions notably at the Berlinische Galerie (2020-2021); Istituto Svizzero, Milan (2020); Drawing Room, London (2019); Museum Folkwang, Essen (2014); Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris (2013); Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (2011); MAMCO, Geneva (2010) and was included in 2018 Biennale of Sydney and the 2014 Liverpool Biennial.

Notably, Bauer's installations also often feature drawings from earlier series, and this "recycling" leads to their ongoing re-contextualization and serves to underscore long-running themes that are then presented in a new, sometimes topical light.

Visually, Bauer's works are typically dark in tone and the contours of his figures are often blurred, through his practice of using a hard thin eraser to rub away and smear the graphite and lithographic chalk and to achieve a sense of depth.

This effect culminates in the technique deployed in Bauer's animated film The Architect, in which the application of an oil paint on Plexiglas is captured in thousands of stop-motion images and even becomes a narrative element in itself which propels the story forward.

Some of his earliest works on paper drew from childhood memories and snapshots from family albums, featuring images of his own relations (as in the 2007 “A viso aperto” sequence from the artist's book History of Masculinity[4]).

For instance, for the group show, Sacré 101 – An Exhibition Based on "The Rite of Spring", Bauer accessed the archives of the Ballets Russes to form his own personal impression of the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky and his suffering of schizophrenia.

[9] These characters are often teenage boys or young men (as in In the Past, Only, Le Quartier, Quimper, and The Architect), whose actions convey a sense of latent violence and repressed (often homoerotic) desires.

By using the medium of drawing, in which each work is the result of a slow process formed by the continual interaction between the eye, mind, and hand, Bauer creates images that are in many ways more “still” than they appear in the photograph on which they are based or if they were shot by camera.