Offset print on Arto Silk 250 g/m² paper
58 x 87 cm
The Kölnischer Kunstverein is pleased to announce the already ninth member’s edition since its publication: We were able to win the artist Mary Bauermeister (born September 7, 1934 in Frankfurt am Main), who lives near Cologne, to create a new work.
The avant-garde artist was one of the most influential representatives of the Fluxus movement in the Rhineland of the 1960s. Artists such as John Cage, Heinz Mack, Nam June Paik, Ben Patterson, and Otto Piene met in her studio and contributed significantly to the new developments in the Cologne art scene with exhibitions, experimental music, performances, readings, and happenings. In 1961 she met Karlheinz Stockhausen in a composition course, with whom she was married between 1967 and 1973. Bauermeister later moved to New York, where she achieved early artistic success. Her universal oeuvre, in which she began to explore geomancy in the 1970s, among other things, includes drawings and paintings as well as object paintings and installations together with landscape designs. Among her best-known groups of works are optical boxes, in which drawings undergo metamorphosis through ground lenses, as well as prismatic, “dot” images and stone collages.
Over the past few years, the artist has regained increased attention, not least through the documentary film Mary Bauermeister – one and one is three, 2020, by director Carmen Belaschek. She has also lately been named the first winner of the new Art Prize of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia.
For the member’s edition, the artist created a photo collage appropriately titled Unser täglich Brot gib uns heute… (Give us today our daily bread…). On one side, the artist holds out a loaf of bread in the middle of which she has placed “life-prolonging substances” … or “rather life-shortening alternatives” presents, so her collected medicines, whereby she has found a means of their “disposal” about this; on the other hand, a bread with a more philosophical approach to the transcendental, mediated by books that she gathers in the middle, such as the Bible, the Koran or the Bhagavad Gita. Where here thoughts are grasped to the life, to art currents or more generally to the culture – cultivare and the artistic creation, there is given space to the spiritual, to the passage from the life to the death.
The Kölnischer Kunstverein mourns the passing of Mary Bauermeister. We thank her very much for the special collaboration and remember a great artist.
