Museum Exhibition Catalogues, Monographs, Artist's Projects, Curatorial Writings and Essays
"For me the glass was a layer in between. All I wanted was to have various layers and various distances. The glass was just there to create a certain distance between myself and the statements I had drawn in the background…I wanted to blur the statements I had made, or to unsettle them. In that sense, the whole process was also a revolt against Max Bill and that fixed purist notion of 'This is art and this is not' and 'one and one is two.' For me, one and one is not two, but also all kinds of other things. In other words I didn’t want tie myself down, didn’t want anything predefined or predetermined." Mary Bauermeister, excerpted from Mary Bauermeister: Worlds in a Box.
Published by Kerber. Text by Reinhard Spieler, Kerstin Skrobanek, Alexander Eiling, Wulf Herzogenrath.
Starting out as a Fluxus-oriented maker of objects and participatory conceptual compositions, Mary Bauermeister (born 1934) had her first solo show at the Stedelijk Museum in 1962. Exhibited alongside her exhibit was a small group survey of American art, which included Robert Rauschenberg's "Goat" paint-sculpture. "I was so flabbergasted by this piece, and I knew: where this is called Art, I will and want to be!" she later recalled. Bauermeister promptly relocated to New York, and quickly fell in with artists such as Duchamp, Warhol and Johns, and also began to make works protesting the Vietnam war and critiquing consumer culture. Her "lens boxes"--wooden or aluminum boxes containing layers of often bubble-like glass with collaged elements--were soon bought up by major American museums, and have become the works for which she is best known today. Here, for the first time, Bauermeister's enigmatic objects are surveyed and contextualized.
