Mary Bauermeister

A multidisciplinary artist known for her intricate, enigmatic assemblages, Mary Bauermeister (1934–2023) often defies categorization. A precursory figure of the Fluxus movement—her studio was the meeting point for a number of movement-defining Happenings—her work plays an integral role in the evolution of both the European and American avant-gardes of the 1960s. Her reliefs and sculptures, which incorporate drawing, text, found objects, organic materials, fabric, and more reference myriad concepts: natural phenomena, astrology and other cosmologies, astronomy, art history, mathematics, the nature of language, and her own “spiritual-metaphysical experiences” were all engaged as conceptual underpinnings in Bauermeister’s multifarious works. Maturing amidst the currents of Minimalism and Pop Art, Bauermeister’s art has resisted labels due to the singular expression of her interests and concerns. Overarching tropes in her oeuvre ponder the simultaneous transience and permanence of the natural world, the optical effects of transparency and magnification, and key dichotomies such as multiplication and variation, structure and order, chance and ephemerality, introversion and extroversion. Her three-dimensional works act as receptacles for her thoughts, ideas, and notes as she investigates a variety of visual and philosophical paradoxes related to the nature of perception, offering a literal and metaphorical window into the inner workings of the artist’s mind.

Born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, Bauermeister’s childhood was defined by totalitarianism and war. This environment of tremendous destruction and suffering naturally shaped her as a person and, later, as an artist. Finding respite in her studies of nature, science, and mathematics, Bauermeister attended secondary school in Cologne from 1946 to 1954. There, her artistic talent emerged under the direction of her drawing teacher, Günther Ott, who encouraged her to pursue an art practice. In 1954, she enrolled at the Hochschule für Gestaltung (the Ulm School of Design) where she took courses with the Swiss artist, architect, and designer Max Bill and the textile artist Helene Nonné-Schmidt, who had studied under Paul Klee. Unable to align herself with the school’s rigid Constructivist mandates, Bauermeister decided to leave after a semester, explaining in a letter to Ott: “The only artworks which receive serious attention here are constructed, mathematically provable, rectangular…”[1] She then enrolled at the Staatliche Schule für Kunst und Handwerk (State School of Arts and Crafts) in Saarbrücken, studying with photographer Otto Steinert. In late 1956, Bauermeister returned to Cologne, where she supported herself by selling her pastel works on paper while cultivating a career as an artist. Between 1960 and 1961, she rented a studio on the top floor of Lintgasse 28, a space that not only fostered her mature art practice, but also became the venue for numerous vanguard exhibitions, concerts, and performances among Bauermeister’s wide circle of friends. John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Nam June Paik, Christo, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and many other visual artists, musicians, poets, and dancers convened at the studio to participate in what became the earliest Happenings, earning Bauermeister the title “mother of the Fluxus movement.” She continued to nurture a close friendship with Stockhausen, an influential composer of electronic and serial music, with whom she also collaborated in a creative capacity; the couple married in 1967 and had two children, Julika and Simon, before divorcing in 1973. Bauermeister’s two younger daughters, Sophie and Esther, were born from subsequent relationships with musician David Johnson and artist Josef Halevi.

In 1962, Bauermeister presented an interdisciplinary selection of work executed between 1958 to 1962 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, The Netherlands—her first museum exhibition. The works in this exhibition featured the themes that would persist throughout her career, including obsessive application of stones, plastic straws, dots, and “honeycomb” structures made with modeling compound. Organized by legendary museum directory Jan Willem Sandberg, Bauermeister’s exhibition was augmented by recordings and scores by Stockhausen and other composers; the exhibition traveled to two other Dutch venues, the Stedelijk Museum in Schiedam and the Groninger Museum in Groningen. Fortuitously, Sandberg had also mounted a concurrent exhibition at the museum, Four Americans, featuring Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Alfred Leslie, and Richard Stankiewicz. Profoundly impacted by the work of Rauschenberg and Johns in particular, Bauermeister was inspired to leave Germany for New York in October 1962 at the age of twenty-nine. Specifically, Rauschenberg’s famous combine Monogram (1955–59, Moderne Museet, Stockholm, Sweden), which features a taxidermized goat adorned with an automobile tire, had a profound effect on Bauermeister, who determined that the United States—and New York especially—could offer her an environment of artistic freedom that Germany, at that time, could not.

In New York, Bauermeister entered the art world swiftly, moving into a studio at the National Arts Club in Gramercy Park in early 1963 and participating in the International Artists’ Summer Seminar at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison, NJ, later that year. The program resulted in an exhibition at Riverside Art Museum, where the young gallerist Alfredo Bonino encountered her work for the first time. Bauermeister joined Galeria Bonino that winter and her work was initially presented at the gallery in the group exhibition 2 sculptors, 4 painters. Bonino mounted her first solo show in 1964, which garnered institutional and critical attention. The Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden all acquired work by Bauermeister in the wake of the show’s success, prompting The New York Times art critic Brian O’Doherty to write: “It will be interesting to see if she has the intelligence and cunning to cope with the major success she is obviously going to have.”[2] The exhibition included early work as well as examples from series that would define her time in the United States: meditative compositions constructed from stones, works created from sewn textiles, and the first lens boxes. Three more solo exhibitions at Galeria Bonino, in 1965, 1967 and 1970, would follow. Bauermeister ultimately stayed in New York for ten years, forming lasting friendships with a number of artists, musicians, choreographers and writers; in addition to Johns, Rauschenberg, Cage, Cunningham, and Paik, her circle also included Joseph Cornell, Ray Johnson, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Hans Namuth, and Allen Ginsberg.

Throughout the 1960s, Bauermeister exhibited in numerous group exhibitions in the United States and Europe, including the esteemed Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Sculpture and Prints at the Whitney Museum (1966) and the seminal Pictures to be Read/Poetry to be Seen at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1967). In related exhibition materials, Bauermeister was frequently referred to as an American artist, and she was often included in surveys of young American artists, demonstrating the outsize influence she had on the contemporary American art scene. In 1971, Bauermeister returned to Europe, settling in a house she designed in collaboration with Erich Schneider-Wessling in the small town of Rösrath, outside of Cologne, in 1968. Though she would continue to visit New York on a regular basis for installations and events, Rösrath would remain her home for the rest of her life, and the sprawling garden that surrounded the house would become an artwork in its own right throughout the following decades. In 1972, Bauermeister was awarded her first museum retrospective; held at the Mittelrhein Museum in Koblenz, Germany, the exhibition featured paintings, assemblages, sculptures, and works on paper executed between 1952 and 1972. That same year, she had her first solo exhibition at Galleria Arturo Schwarz in Milan, Italy. In 1974, she was given another retrospective showcasing her two decades of work at the Rathaus Bensberg, the town hall of Bergisch Gladbach.

In the late 1970s and continuing into the mid-1980s, Bauermeister accepted commissions to design gardens intended for meditation and leisure. Often including water features and crystal arrangements, Bauermeister earned a reputation for her Zen-like landscape designs, leading to several notable commissions including the Landeszentralbank Wiesbaden in Wiesbaden; the Kölnische Rückversicherung in Cologne; and the Federal German Foreign Office in Bonn. In 1980, the Städtische Galerie Villa Zanders in Bergisch Gladbach presented Bauermeister’s third museum retrospective, Retrospektive 1955-1980. In 1985, she was included in the International Crystallography Congress held at the Universität Bielefeld, where she presented a solo exhibition of her work and discussed the topic “Symmetries and Serial Processes in Art and Music” with faculty members of the university’s mathematics department. The following year, Bauermeister joined the Postnukleare Aktionstage (Post-Nuclear Action Days), a festival of cultural programming in Wuppertal, where she spoke with political scientists and art historians on the “Socio-Political Relevance of Contemporary Art.” Additional exhibitions that highlighted Bauermeister’s prominent role in the art scene of the 1950s and 1960s were Die sechziger Jahre, Kölns Weg zur Kunst-Metropole – vom Happening zum Kunstmarkt (The Sixties – Cologne’s Road to Becoming an Art Metropolis – from Happening to Art Market) at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne (1986) and Return to the Object: American and European Art from the Fifties and Sixties at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (1988).

In 2011, Edition Elke Heidenreich bei C. Bertelsmann published Bauermeister’s autobiography, Ich hänge im Triolengitter – Mein Leben mit Karlheinz Stockhausen (Hanging in a Triplet Grid – My Life with Karlheinz Stockhausen). In 2019, Bauermeister received the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit (Verdienstkreuz 1. Klasse), the highest honor that the Federal Republic of Germany can bestow on individuals, in recognition of her contributions to culture and her artistic achievements. In 2021, Bauermeister was honored as the first winner of the North Rhine-Westphalia Art Prize, awarded by the NRW Ministry of Culture.

Bauermeister continued to explore the signature themes that occupied her practice for sixty years until the final years of her life. In her last two decades, her work has been included in numerous important solo and group exhibitions, most notably WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2007); Welten in der Schachtel (Worlds in the Box) at the Wilhelm Hack Museum in Ludwigshafen (2010), which also featured the work by Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Cornell, Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, and Andy Warhol; Zero - Die internationale Kunstbewegung der 50er und 60er Jahre (The International Art Movement of the 50s and 60s) at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin (2015); Point – Line – Plain – TV at the Nam June Paik Art Center in Seoul, South Korea (2016); Zwischen den Zeilen. Kunst in Briefen von Niki de Saint Phalle bis Joseph Beuys (Between the Lines: Art in Letters from Niki de Saint Phalle to Joseph Beuys) at the Sprengel Museum in Hannover (2017); Sound Goes Image. Partituren zwischen Musik und Bildender Kunst (Scores Between Music and Fine Art) at the Horst Jannssen Museum in Oldenburg (2017); Fountain of Youth, ESPE (École supérieure du professorat et de l'éducation), Mont-Saint-Aignan, France (2018); Giant Steps: Artists and the 1960s, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY (2018); Light, Line, Color and Space, University at Buffalo Anderson Gallery (2018); Objects Like Us, The Domestic Plane: New Perspectives On Tabletop Art Objects, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2018); KÖLN 68! Protest. Pop. Provokation, Kölnisches Stadtmuseum, Cologne (2018); “Cry Gold and See Black,” curated by Julie Mehretu for Artistic License: Six Takes on the Guggenheim Collection, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY (2019); Out of Place: A Feminist Look at the Collection, Brooklyn Museum, NY (2020); and Surrealism in American Art, Centre de la Vielle Charité, Marseille, France (2021).

Notable solo surveys of her work include Mary Bauermeister. Die 1950er Jahre at the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum & Papiermuseum in Düren (2013); Mary Bauermeister-Da capo-Werke aus 60 Jahren at the Mittelrhein Museum, Koblenz (2015); Mary Bauermeister: The New York Decade at the Smith College Museum of Art, Smith College, Northampton, MA (2015), which included the most thorough English-language publication on her work thus far; Pli Score Pli: Mary Bauermeister at the Kunstmuseum Solingen (2017); and Mary Bauermeister – Zeichen, Worte, Universen at the Kunstmuseum Villa Zanders, Bergisch Gladbach (2017).

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery first exhibited Bauermeister’s work in 1998 and has featured her work in several group exhibitions including The Time Is N♀w (2017). The gallery became the artist’s sole representative in 2018 and has presented two solo exhibitions of her work: Mary Bauermeister: Live in Peace or Leave the Galaxy (2019) and Mary Bauermeister: Fuck the System (2023).

Mary Bauermeister passed away in March of 2023 in her home in Rösrath. The Studio of Mary Bauermeister is preparing a Catalogue Raisonné, which Michael Rosenfeld Gallery will continue to support while championing her legacy in the years to come.

Bauermeister is represented in numerous museum collections worldwide including The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Allentown Art Museum, Allentown, PA; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL;

Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, France; Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME; Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY; Bundesministerium des Innern, für Bau und Heimat, Bonn, Germany; Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, Bonn, Germany; Canton Museum of Art, Canton, OH; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; City of Herten, Germany; City of Rösrath, Germany; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; Cooley Gallery, Reed College, Portland, OR; CUBO, Gruppo Unipol, Bologna, Italy; The David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, Providence, RI; Davis Museum, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI; Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin, Germany; Figge Art Museum, Davenport, IA; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, MI; Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY; Gallery of Art, University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA; Goethe Institut, London, United Kingdom; Grinnell College Museum of Art, Grinnell College, Grinnell, IA; Groninger Museum, Groningen, The Netherlands; Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, NY; Guild Hall, London, United Kingdom; Hampshire College Art Gallery, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA; Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, NY; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland; Kölnisches Stadtmuseum, Cologne, Germany; Kulturamt für den Stadtkölnische Kunstbesitz, Cologne, Germany; Kunsthaus NRW, Kornelimünster, Aachen, Germany; Kunstmuseum, Bonn, Germany; Kunstmuseum Villa Zanders, Bergisch Gladbach, Germany; Kunstsammlung Deutsche Bundesbank, Berlin, Germany; Kykuit, The Rockefeller Estate, Pocantico Hills, NY; LVR-LandesMuseum, Bonn, Germany; The Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Amherst, MA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Mills College Art Museum, Mills College, Oakland, CA; Minnesota Museum of American Art, St. Paul, MN; Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA; Museum FLUXUS+, Potsdam, Germany; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Museumsverein Düren am Leopold-Hoesch-Museum Düren, Düren, Germany; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, NJ; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; RISD Museum, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI; Robert and Elaine Stein Galleries, Wright State University, Dayton, OH; Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetries, University of Iowa Library, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa; Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; Sammlung zeitgenössischer Kunst der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Berlin, Germany; The San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, CA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Smith College Museum of Art, Smith College, Northampton, MA; Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Spencer Museum of Art, The University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS; Staatliches Museum, Schwerin, Germany; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Israel; UB Anderson Gallery, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY; University Art Museum, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM; University Art Museum, University at Albany, Albany, NY; University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa; Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal, Germany; Wheaton College Permanent Collection, Wheaton College, Norton, MA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Wichita Art Museum, Wichita, KS; Wilhelm Hack Museum, Ludwigshafen, Germany; Williams College Museum of Art, Williams College, Williamstown, MA; Zero Foundation, Düsseldorf, Germany.

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC is the exclusive representative of the Estate of Mary Bauermeister.

[1] Mary Bauermeister artist website, https://www.marybauermeister.org/biography.html, accessed April 2018

[2] Brian O’Doherty, “International Selection of Painting and Sculpture in Local Galleries,” The New York Times, December 29, 1963, X21