Mary Hilde Ruth Bauermeister is a German artist who works in sculpture, drawing, installation, performance, and music. Influenced by Fluxus artists and Nouveau Réalisme, her work addresses esoteric issues of how information is transferable through society. "I only followed an inner drive to express what was not yet there, in reality or thought," she said of her practice. "To make art was more a finding, searching process than a knowing." Since the 1970s, the artist's work has concentrated on the themes surrounding New Age spirituality, specifically geomancy, the divine interpretation of lines on the ground.
Biography
Early life and artistic beginnings
Mary Bauermeister was born in Frankfurt am Main to Wolf Bauermeister, a professor of genetics and anthropology, and Laura Bauermeister, a singer. Mary Bauermeister was artistically influenced in secondary school by her drawing teacher, Günter Ott. She studied in 1954–55 at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm and in 1955–56 at the Staatlichen Schule für Kunst und Handwerk in Saarbrücken. She has been active since 1957 as a freelance artist in Cologne. In 1960, in her studio at Lintgasse 28 in Cologne, she launched a series of gatherings of members of the evolving global artistic movement Fluxus. At her invitation, avant-garde poets, composers and visual artists such as Hans G Helms, David Tudor, John Cage, Christo, Wolf Vostell, George Brecht, and Nam June Paik organised unconventional concerts of the "newest music", readings, exhibits, and actions. These activities have been described as "comparatively non-hierarchical exchanges of information across national, disciplinary and age boundaries", contributing in that way to the character of the Fluxus movement which had been developing during the 1950s. In 1961, she took part in Karlheinz Stockhausen's composition course at the Internationalen Ferienkursen für Neue Musik in Darmstadt. Later that same year she collaborated with Stockhausen in a theatre piece titled Originale, which was given twelve performances at the Theater am Dom, Cologne, from 26 October to 6 November 1961. Amongst the performers were Bauermeister herself, Nam June Paik, David Tudor, and Hans G. Helms. In 1962 she had her first solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam with a simultaneous day-long performance of electronic music under Stockhausen's direction. On 3 April 1967, in San Francisco, she married Stockhausen, with whom she had two children: Julika and Simon. They were divorced in 1972. She has two younger daughters, Sophie and Esther.
In the 1970s, Mary Bauermeister returned to Germany and began to occupy herself with marginal sciences, for example Geomancy, the science of energy structures in the earth. She used the knowledge she garnered from these studies for the planning of gardens, which she implemented for public and private clients throughout the world. The artist now lives in Rösrath near Cologne. On the occasion of her 70th birthday in September 2004, the Cologne Museum Ludwig acquired her 1963 wall installation Needless Needles and arranged a display of the work for several months. In 2019, Museum Ludwig acquired three more works by Mary Bauermeister, Rundes Wabenbild, Magnetbild Schwarz-Weiss and the relating 34 sketches Möglichkeiten Serieller Malerei. 2018 Mary Bauermeister signed an exclusive contract with the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery in New York.
Honours
On 15 June 2020, Bauermeister was awarded the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit for her contributions to Germany's post-war art scene. She received the award from the German StateMinister of Culture and Science, Isabel Pfeiffer-Poensgen. Based on material translated from the German Wikipedia
