Mary Bauermeister (1934–2023)

It is with profound sadness that we share the passing of Mary Bauermeister (September 7, 1934–March 2, 2023), a genre-defying artist and dear friend. Michael Rosenfeld Gallery Director halley k harrisburg reflects, “After a long and heroic battle with cancer, we have lost a legend and perhaps the funniest artist to grace the art world; Mary had the uncommon ability to make us laugh and ponder our existence at the same time. She never missed the opportunity to expound on the mystical, the spritural, or the existential. Michael and I will cherish the time we spent with Mary, especially our walks together among the wild plants, stone monuments, and architectural structures of her magical gardens in Rösrath. There, her passions for the natural world and the mysteries of the cosmos were aligned—she often dreamed of infinite possibilities.” Michael Rosenfeld Gallery has represented Bauermeister since 2018 and we are honored to be responsible for furthering her legacy in the years ahead. In the wake of her passing, we are consoled by her maxim that became the title of her 2019 solo show at the gallery: “Live in peace or leave the galaxy.” We wish her well on her cosmic journey.

Over the course of a career that spanned six decades, Bauermeister authored a multidisciplinary oeuvre that defies categorization. She became a seminal figure of the Fluxus movement in the early 1960s, when her Cologne studio became meeting point for several defining artists of the movement, who staged some of the first Happenings there. Bauermeister’s reliefs and sculptures incorporate drawing, text, found objects, natural materials, and fabric, and reference a plethora of concepts as diverse as the materials they contain: environmental phenomena, astronomy, mathematics, the contradictions of language, and her own “spiritual-metaphysical experiences.” 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. Primary among them were her fascination with the simultaneous transience and persistence of the natural world, her optical experiments in transparency and magnification, and her endless investigations into the visual relationships between multiplication and variation, structure and order, chance and ephemerality, introversion and extroversion. Bauermeister’s three-dimensional receptacles of thoughts, ideas, and notes, referred to as her “lens boxes,” contain visual, conceptual, and philosophical paradoxes that challenge prevailing perspectives and offer windows—both literal and metaphorical—onto the inner workings of her extraordinary mind.
 
Born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, Bauermeister attended secondary school in Cologne from 1946 to 1954, where she began creating her first works on paper under the supervision of her drawing teacher, Günther Ott, an early admirer of her artistic talent. In 1954, she began her studies at the Hochschule für Gestaltung (Ulm School of Design) in Ulm, where she took courses with Swiss artist, architect, and designer Max Bill and Helene Nonné-Schmidt, who had studied with Paul Klee. Unable to align herself with the school’s rigid constructivist structure, Bauermeister wrote to Ott: “The only artworks which receive serious attention here are constructed, mathematically provable, rectangular…” She left Ulm after one semester, registering at the Staatliche Schule für Kunst und Handwerk (State School of Arts and Crafts) in Saarbrücken and studying with photographer Otto Steinert. In 1956, Bauermeister returned to Cologne where she supported herself by selling her pastel works on paper. Between 1960 and 1961, she rented a studio on the top floor of Lintgasse 28, where she fostered an environment of avant-garde experimentation, hosting numerous exhibitions, concerts and performances. John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Nam June Paik, Christo, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and many other artists, musicians, and dancers staged some of the earliest pre-Fluxus Happenings there, 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 would marry in 1967 and have two children, Julika and Simon. Bauermeister and Stockhausen later divorced in 1973. Two daughters, Sophie and Esther, were born from subsequent relationships with musician David Johnson and artist Josef Halevi.
 
In 1962, Bauermeister exhibited her work for the first time in a museum setting, presenting an interdisciplinary group of works executed between 1958 and 1962 alongside recordings and scores by Stockhausen and other composers at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Organized by Jan Willem Sandberg, the museum’s director, the exhibition later traveled to the Stedelijk Museum in Schiedam and the Groninger Museum in Groningen. Sandberg also mounted a concurrent exhibition, Four Americans, featuring Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Alfred Leslie, and Richard Stankiewicz. Impressed with and inspired by the work of Rauschenberg and Johns in particular, Bauermeister left Germany for New York in October 1962, at the age of twenty-nine. She was especially affected by Rauschenberg’s famous Combine Monogram (1955–59, Moderne Museet, Stockholm, Sweden), which featured a taxidermied goat adorned with an automobile tire, as she felt it demonstrated the extent of the artistic freedom the United States—and New York especially—could offer her that Germany at the time could not.
 
Bauermeister’s career took off swiftly upon moving to New York. In early 1963, she participated in the International Artists’ Summer Seminar at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison, New Jersey, which resulted in an exhibition at Riverside Art Museum. There, budding gallerist Alfredo Bonino encountered her work, and Bauermeister joined Galeria Bonino that winter. Her work was initially presented at the gallery in the group exhibition 2 sculptors, 4 painters, which was followed by her first solo show in 1964. The exhibition as well received by both critics and institutions, with the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture all acquiring works, 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.”[1] The exhibition included a selection of early work, as well as the pieces that would define Bauermeister’s time in the United States: her compositions with stones, sewn pictures, and the first lens boxes. Three more solo exhibitions at Galeria Bonino, in 1965, 1967, and 1970, would follow. Bauermeister stayed in New York for the next ten years, forming lasting friendships with many eminent artists, musicians, choreographers, and writers; in addition to Johns, Rauschenberg, Cage, Cunningham, and Paik, she also became close with 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 in 1966 (now the Whitney Biennial) and the groundbreaking Pictures to be Read/Poetry to be Seen at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in 1967. In related exhibition materials, Bauermeister was frequently referred to as an American artist and was often included in surveys of young American artists, demonstrating the extent of her influence on the contemporary American art scene. In 1971, Bauermeister returned to Europe, settling in the house she built for herself in 1968 in the small town of Rösrath, near Cologne, though she would continue to visit New York regularly for installations and events. In 1972, Bauermeister was awarded her first retrospective at the Mittelrhein Museum in Koblenz, Germany, which featured paintings, objects and works on paper from 1952–72. That same year, she had her first solo exhibition at Galleria Arturo Schwarz in Milan, Italy and, in 1974, she was given a retrospective showcasing two decades of work at the Rathaus Bensberg (the town hall) in Bergisch Gladbach.
 
In the late 1970s and continuing into the mid-1980s, Bauermeister began working with water and crystals to design commissioned gardens, both interior and exterior, meant for pleasure and meditation. Notable commissions included the gardens she designed for the corporate offices of the Landeszentralbank Wiesbaden in Wiesbaden, 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 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.” The 1980s also witness Bauermeister participate in two exhibitions that exemplified her prominent role in shaping art of the 1950s and 1960s: 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).
 
Over the last two decades, Bauermeister has consistently been included in historical group exhibitions including WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2007); Welten in der Schachtel (Worlds in the Box) alongside Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Cornell, Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, and Andy Warhol, at the Wilhelm Hack Museum in Ludwigshafen (2010); 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); and, in 2017, 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 and Sound Goes Image. Partituren zwischen Musik und Bildender Kunst (Scores Between Music and Fine Art) at the Horst Janssen Museum in Oldenburg.
 
The artist was awarded numerous solo exhibitions throughout her career; notable recent examples 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 (2015); Mary Bauermeister: The New York Decade at the Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA (2015); Pli Score Pli: Mary Bauermeister at the Kunstmuseum Solingen (2017); Mary Bauermeister – Zeichen, Worte, Universen at the Kunstmuseum Villa Zanders, Bergisch Gladbach (2017); and 1+1=3, Die Kunstwelten der Mary Bauermeister at the Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Kiel (October 2022–March 2023).
 
In 2011, she published her first autobiographical book, Ich hänge im Triolengitter – Mein Leben mit Karlheinz Stockhausen (Hanging in a Triplet Grid – My Life with Karlheinz Stockhausen) (Edition Elke Heidenreich bei C. Bertelsmann). In 2019, in recognition of her cultural contributions and achievements, 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 2021, she was honored as the first winner of the North Rhine-Westphalia Art Prize, awarded by the NRW Ministry of Culture.

Bauermeister’s work has been a consistent presence in Michael Rosenfeld Gallery’s program since 1998. After taking on her representation in 2019, the gallery mounted the solo exhibition Mary Bauermeister: Live in Peace or Leave the Galaxy, which opened to critical acclaim and reinvigorated the artist’s reputation in the U.S.

Bauermeister continued to create art until the very end of her life, exploring the signature themes that have occupied her practice for the last sixty years, continuously creating works that explore the seemingly infinite ideas that fueled her imagination. “The question interests me, not the answer.” Bauermeister stated in 1965. “The question is infinity; the answer, too definite…Art is for me the possibility for plurality." [2]

A memorial service is being organized. Details to come.

Learn more about Mary Bauermeister