Mary Bauermeister was born in 1934 in Frankfurt am Main. After studying at the art academies of Ulm and Saarbrücken, she moved to Cologne in 1956. Her studio at Lintgasse 28 in Cologne was an important meeting place for avant-garde artists and musicians around 1960. Performers, composers, and Fluxus artists such as Nam June Paik, John Cage, Karl Heinz Stockhausen, David Tudor, Wolf Vostell, Christo, and Benjamin Petterson gathered here to organize the latest music performances, events, and happenings. Paik performed his legendary action Etude for Pianoforte (1959-1960), where after playing a piece by Chopin, he cut Cage’s tie and squeezed a bottle of shampoo on the heads of Tudor and Cage.
Mary Bauermeister’s oeuvre includes sculptures, assemblages, drawings, performances, and music. When Bauermeister participated in one of the “international summer courses for new music” in Darmstadt in 1961 under the direction of Stockhausen, she developed her Malerische Konzeption, a model for applying serial compositional techniques to the visual arts.
Black and white photo of Mary Bauermeister in front of her work ‘Wabenbild’
Mary Bauermeister in front of ‘Wabenbild’. Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 1962.
Her reliefs and sculptures, incorporating drawings, texts, found objects, natural materials, and fabrics, reference various concepts: from natural phenomena and astronomy to mathematics and language, as well as her own “spiritual-metaphysical experiences.” Karl Heinz Stockhausen wrote about her work: “It is typical that she does not strive for a personal style recognizable by motifs, techniques, routines, and material explorations, but instead considers every material or object (found or artificially made), every technique, every stylistic provision as material.”
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