10 things to know about Mary Bauermeister

Mary Bauermeister was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, in 1934. After war broke out, she and her older brother, Martin, were evacuated to a mountain town near the border of Austria. Bauermeister has credited this experience with informing her unconventionality: ‘I was a war child,’ she told curator Hans Ulrich Obrist in a 2014 interview. ‘From the age of 10, I’d conspired against adults.’

Bauermeister eschewed a traditional path in order to pursue her art. She studied at Hochschule für Gestaltung, a school of design in Ulm, before attending the State School for Arts and Crafts in Saarbrücken. She ultimately dropped out and settled in Cologne as an independent artist.

From 1960 to 1961, Bauermeister rented a top-floor studio at Lintgasse 28 in Cologne. The studio became a meeting space and concert hall for experimental artists working across media. These gatherings attracted a wide circle of Bauermeister’s friends, including video artist Nam June Paik, dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham and installation artist Christo.

It was during one such performance that Paik leapt into the audience and cut off the composer John Cage’s necktie. These events earned Bauermeister the moniker Mutter der Fluxus-Bewegung, or ‘Mother of the Fluxus movement’. Less a fixed aesthetic than a community of like-minded creatives, Fluxus was rooted in rebellion and a desire to blur the boundaries between art and everyday life.

Her parents’ respective fields of science and music — her father was a professor of genetics and anthropology, her mother a singer — would become powerful influences on Bauermeister’s work.

She was interested in musical theory and sought to translate the underlying principles of composition into her visual art; she also wove musical references into her compositions such as line drawings of piano keys and torn score sheets.

In Bauermeister’s first museum exhibition, held at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1962, her work was accompanied by a day-long performance of electronic music by pioneering composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. He and Bauermeister would later marry and have two children together. The couple divorced in 1972.

Rather than separating disciplines such as science and spirituality, Bauermeister was fascinated by the relationship between seemingly disparate fields. She looked for order amidst chaos, finding a sense of cosmic wonder in the patterns repeated throughout nature.

Mathematics and the natural world converge across her practice. She organised certain compositions according to the Fibonacci sequence, and in her lens boxes, numerical equations appear alongside stacks of stone. Later in her career, she turned more explicitly towards the mystical, using the spiritual method of geomancy to inform her compositions.

A defining element of Bauermeister’s body of work is her lens boxes, the idea for which materialised in the form of a dream. ‘I dreamt that each of my paintings was a walk-in space,’ Bauermeister told the museum director Willem Sandberg. ‘I essentially walked into my paintings, and so later I started to build boxes.’

These boxes are miniature worlds filled with ink and pencil drawings, found materials, painted rocks and more. The front glass covers are dotted with magnifying lenses of varying sizes, playing with perspective and perception.

After the first lens boxes were exhibited at Bonino Gallery in New York in 1964, they quickly became her most sought-after works. Bauermeister continued to engage with the series throughout her life, constantly revisiting the format’s rich possibilities.

In 1962, Bauermeister moved to New York as the contemporary art scene shifted from abstraction to Pop Art, Minimalism and experimental mediums. While there, she became represented by the leading Bonino Gallery and grew acquainted with figures like Robert Rauschenberg and Niki de Saint Phalle.

Her move to New York also gave her an international platform and seeded some of her most influential works. She was gaining traction at an institutional level, with The Museum of Modern Art acquiring several of her works throughout the 1960s and The Whitney Museum of American Art acquiring her lens box Homage to Marbert Du Breer (1964) in 1965.

While Bauermeister is often associated with Fluxus, she refused to work within the confines of any one movement or medium, instead considering how apparently separate things may be connected. She explored experimental music, abstraction, sculpture, painting, drawing, installation and performance art alongside a deep engagement with the natural world.

Describing her practice, she has said: ‘I only followed an inner drive to express what was not yet there, in reality or thought. To make art was more a finding, searching process than a knowing.’ Rather than offering fixed answers, her work invites the viewer to remain curious and question what they see.

Natural materials such as stones, sand and seagrass became a central component of her oeuvre. In a 1967 interview, Bauermeister explains, ‘I was never interested to make a drawing of a stone, but to include what is the experience of something natural in a piece of art — not the imitation, or let’s say the illusion, but the thing itself.’

Her stone works probe the mathematical patterns found in nature. Using stones sourced from around the world, Bauermeister would organise them into meticulous patterns sequenced by size. Taken together, these works illuminate an important throughline of her practice: that nature captivates in its orderliness as much as in its beauty.

After nearly a decade in New York, Bauermeister returned to Germany and settled in Rösrath-Forsbach, where she would live for the rest of her life. Her home was surrounded by a large garden, inciting her engagement with nature to expand from individual materials to the landscape itself. She held gatherings, performances, readings and discussions there, creating a creative environment that operated in parallel to her former Cologne studio.

Bauermeister used water, crystals and stones as visual touchstones throughout her gardens, and incorporated these elements into many of her garden commissions. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Bauermeister executed several large commissions, including projects for Landeszentralbank Wiesbaden, a rooftop garden for Kölnische Rückversicherung in Cologne and an interior garden for the Federal German Foreign Office in Bonn.

Since Bauermeister’s passing in 2023 at the age of 88, her diverse body of work has been revisited by scholars and collectors. Long overshadowed by the male artists around her, she is increasingly being recognised as a major figure in her own right.

Her institutional profile is rising, and she has been included in recent group exhibitions at the Seattle Art Museum, the Neue Galerie in Kassel and The Whitney Museum of American Art. The current exhibition Inner Worlds: Visions from the Hirshhorn Collection in Chicago places her work alongside Yayoi Kusama and Niki de Saint Phalle, and the preparation of a catalogue raisonné by the Mary Bauermeister Art Estate adds another important layer of scholarly validation. Together, these developments point to an artist whose significance is still being recalibrated.