Helena Almeida: 'Seduzir' [To Seduce, 2002] (detail)

Collection

Finsternis gekreuzter Schatten [Darkness in the Crossed Shadows]

Image caption
LOTHAR BAUMGARTEN

Finsternis gekreuzter Schatten [Darkness in the Crossed Shadows]

  • 1969
  • Chromogenic print on paper
  • 64,8 x 82,6 cm
  • Edition 5/10
  • Cat. F_136
  • Acquired in 2012
By:
Isabel Tejeda

Finsternis gekreuzter Schatten [Darkness in the Crossed Shadows] and Pilgrim are two photographs by Lothar Baumgarten from 1969, while he was still a student at the Kunstakademie Fine Arts Academy in Düsseldorf. He studied under Joseph Beuys and his early work was greatly influenced by his reading of Claude Lévi-Strauss. The questioning of language and of the disciplines of representation in two and three dimensions, the juxtaposition between nature and culture, along with the rejection of the art market are the underlying themes of those early works. He worked with ephemeral sculptures which would only later exist in photographs. That was a political ploy, so as not to produce items that could be sold.

Those early pieces hinted at Baumgarten’s future path as an ethnological and anthropological artist. However, the journey – including the several months he spent with the Yanomami Indians in the Amazon jungle in the 1970s – would be metaphorical, a mock-up which he shot in the back garden of his home, in a forest close to the Rhine. The German artist used objects that he came across and changed slightly to turn into small sculptures; in the case of Pilgrim (1969), he used a small toy fawn that he slightly modified by placing it on what seems to be a tropical flower. In the objects of this series, entitled Kultur- Natur, Manipulierte Realität, which ended in 1972, the artist was seeking a reading that would fuse the two items: we are here guided to read the image as a mythological animal, a winged mammal. In Finsternis gekreuzter Schatten (1969), he plays with the poetic ambiguity of the title, which contrasts with the image: a chequered floor, whose rhombuses seem to be trying to cross a closed door, is shown from a low, fragmented angle.

Isabel Tejeda

 
By:
Roberto Díaz
Lothar Baumgarten
Rheinsberg 1944 - Berlin 2018

Lothar Baumgarten is one of the leading exponents of conceptual art from the latter part of the 1960s. He studied at Staatliche Akademie für Bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe [State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe] (1968) and at the Kunstakademie [Fine Arts Academy] in Düsseldorf (1969-1971), where he was taught by Joseph Beuys. His work, using different media including temporary sculptures, installations and photography, emerged from his interest in anthropology and ethnography regarding the concept of “otherness” and the questioning of Western thought and representation under the influence of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s comparative structuralist method. His early works included Unsettled Objects (1968-1969) and his film Origin of the Night [Amazon Cosmos] (1973-1977). In the wake of his travels in Brazil and time spent with the Yanomami Indians in the Venezuelan Amazon between 1978 and 1980, his work delved even further into the way that Western discourse perceives the “Other”, their environment and their language. Indeed, the problem of language is another key factor in his work, alluding to the cultural specificities of the exhibition space in which he was intervening. One such example was the installation at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1993 referring to North-American Indian tribes.

After his first solo show at the Konrad Fischer Galerie (Düsseldorf, Germany, 1972), his work was featured internationally at events including Documenta 5, 7, 9 and 10 (1972, 1982, 1992 and 1997); the Venice Biennale (1978, 1984 and 2001), where he was awarded the Golden Lion in 1984. He also had solo shows, particularly at the Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh, United States, 1987), the Georges Pompidou Centre (Paris, 1987), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, 1993), the Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg, Germany, 2001) and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (2008). In 2016, he installed The Ship is Going Under, the Ice is Breaking Through at the Palacio de Cristal, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid.

Roberto Díaz

 
«Lothar Baumgarten. Autofocus retina», Museu D`Art Contemporani de Barcelona MACBA (Barcelona, 2008).
Kaira Cabañas, Hal Foster, Michael Jakob, BartomeuMarí, Carig Owens, Anne Rorimer & Friedrich Heubach Lothar Baumgarten. Autofocus retina, Barcelona, MACBA, 2007. Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 2.