Durchblick: außen-innen / Vista: exterior-interior

The „Kunst-Kabinett Hespert,” which evolved from an old village school built in 1850, is the municipal gallery of the town of Reichshof. A sculpture park called “Platz der Künste” (Arts Square), in which more than 20 works are displayed in public space, has developed in the immediate vicinity of the gallery since the early 1990s. Until 2021, it also featured a work by Mary Bauermeister, which had to be moved to an interior space for conservational reasons. Her glass diptych “Außen-Innen,” however, which the artist created for the middle window of the art cabinet, is on display throughout the year. It is part of a group of works for which she used optical lenses, often combined with natural materials such as shells, stones, grass, but also with drawings and writing. In this instance, she simply used round lenses and square prisms mounted on a glass pane which create rainbow-coloured and iridescent reflections, depending on the incidence of the sun. Looking through them reveals various degrees of enlargement of the environment viewed through the glass. Objects appear distorted and unfamiliar, even upside-down in some cases. It is certainly one of the principles of Mary Bauermeister’s practice to show how diverse perspectives on things can be, while at the same time everything is interwoven and connected.
The multifaceted character of Bauermeister’s work, which cannot be clearly assigned to an art movement like Fluxus or a genre like sculpture or drawing, doubtless hampered her absorption into the artworld, which prefers simple labels. “Needless needless,” one of her major works from the 1960s, a light box of Sicilian sheets with ink, pencil, primer, and black thread, only came to the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in 2004. In 2022, Kunsthalle Kiel dedicated a retrospective show to her.