Description:
gradually increasing layered rows of pebbles of graduated sizes glued to 3/4 in. linen covered board; abstract
Label Text:
A member of an avant-garde circle of musicians, artists, and intellectuals in postwar Germany, Mary Bauermeister came to the United States in 1962 and spent a decade working in New York. Interested since childhood in the mathematical principles behind natural processes, Bauermeister often used natural materials such as sand, stones, or honeycombs in her early work and after coming to this country.
Bauermeister’s “stone pictures” are an example of a chance find of natural objects. Fascinated by the shapes and colors of flat stones she first discovered on a beach in Sicily in 1962, the artist began collecting and experimenting with them, stacking the stones in “towers” of graduated sizes on panels.
As the artist has said of her work:
"I am not beautifying or celebrating matter even if I work with stones. Of course I let them express themselves as material, but it is always a principle of order which they follow, a principle of geometry or cosmic order along which, for example, the growth of plants or minerals happens. These are thought-forms in matter."
Tags:
abstract; mathematics Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=SC+1972.42.1 |
