Dark Romance proudly presents Hansjurgen Bauer's Birds of Paradise, Being a Presentation of Crystalline and Vegetable Aphrodites. The Whole Comprised of Twin Volumes: A Host of Angels — A Brace of Devils.

The marvelous art of Hansjurgen Bauer revels uninhibitedly in voluptuary form and color, taking influences from decades, centuries and ages past and intensifying them with the modern tools of digital saturation, layering and refinement. The richly brilliant palette of the pre-Raphaelites glows against smokey shadows ripe with mystery, as moments seemingly captured in Bedouin tents or Spanish castles appear... Often laid across these sensual images are meticulously engraved creatures or seemingly cryptic lettered illuminations from medieval texts. Whether cleverly ironic or surreally enigmatic, Mr. Bauer's occasional layered juxtapositions of line art and digital photography add to the playfulness that make his overall collection of pieces so appealing. In the artist's own words, this gallery of images is "continuing the work of the esteemed calligrapher Georg Bocskay, the miniaturist Joris Hoefnagel, deceased painters and anonymous engravers, but deriving primarily from the mind's eye of the photographer."