Variation on Quentin Metsys

Mary Bauermeister’s Variation on Quentin Metsys refers to a painting by the fifteenth Century Flemish painter Quentin Metsys that shows the money counter and his wife. While travelling in Holland in the early 1960s, Bauermeister had an epiphany when she discovered a cache of optical lenses in an antique shop. She bought them and began experimenting with them in her studio, using the lenses to magnify and distort objects she created and placed in wooden boxes with glass windows. In a highly contemporary way, the stacked sequence of boxes juxtaposes delicately drawn, enigmatic imagery—from umbrellas, to text, to parachutes—with the refracting effects of the optical lenses.