By Mary Bauermeister
Located in New York, NY
Mary Bauermeister
Rainbow, 1973
Lithograph and silkscreen on creamy white paper
Hand signed, dated and numbered 56/250 by the artist on the front
19 x 25.5 inches
Unframed
This work is on the permanent collection of various institutions like: Rice University, Samuel Dorksy Museum of Art, Rutgers Zimmerli Museum and Wheaton College Massachusetts.
While studying the fringe sciences the 1970s, Bauermeister created Rainbow (1973), a lithograph and silkscreen. She uses a creamy white background as the base. Two intersecting diagonal bands of color transcend across the page, and black cursive lettering dances over the surface serving as a mind map of interweaving ideas. Through the central band, Bauermeister shifts through the color spectrum; she begins with red and finishes with violet. Inspired by music, she uses strokes of color that are rhythmically smeared across the lithograph.
The surface lettering, a kind of visual poetry, explores her interest in human emotion and science. The viewer can see Bauermeister’s thoughts as they flow into one another through the use of words such as bliss, love, and healing. Bauermeister also includes a repetition of words such as cancer, sickness, and cure. The word cancer emerges from a cell-like shape. A careful study of the words shows that they may seem dark in nature; however, she juxtaposes these words against the cheerful title and colors. Perhaps the rainbow symbolizes a new hope, an inspiration for an optimistic future.
-Courtesy to the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art
About Mary Bauermeister:
A multidisciplinary artist known for her intricate and enigmatic assemblages, Mary Bauermeister (1934-2023) continues to defy categorization with layered works in a range of media. A precursory figure of the Fluxus movement—her studio was the meeting point for a number of defining artists of the avant-garde—her work plays an integral role in the discussion of art, both European and American, that emerged from the 1960s. Her reliefs and sculptures, which have incorporated drawing, text, found objects, natural materials and fabric, reference a plethora of concepts: from natural phenomena and astronomy to mathematics and language, as well as her own “spiritual-metaphysical experiences.” Maturing amidst the currents of Minimalism and Pop Art, Bauermeister’s art has resisted labels due to the singular expression of her interests and concerns, among them the simultaneous transience and permanence of the natural world with experimentations in transparency and magnification, multiplication and variation, structure and order, chance and ephemerality, introversion and extroversion. Her three-dimensional receptacles of thoughts, ideas, and notes contain visual, conceptual, and philosophical paradoxes that challenge perceptions and that offer literal and metaphorical windows into which one can glimpse the inner workings of the artist’s mind.
- Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld...
Category
1970s Abstract Mixed Media Prints and Multiples
MaterialsLithograph, Screen, Mixed Media
