Over the last few years, the oeuvre of Mary Bauermeister (*1934) has been extensively rediscovered and celebrated. She is nowadays considered to be one of Germany’s leading female post-war artists. In the early 1960s, her studio in Cologne, located at Lintgasse 28, was the meeting place for artists, poets and composers such as Nam June Paik, Christo, Joseph Beuys, John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, whom she later married. They used experimental music, readings, exhibitions, performances and happenings to explore the limits of social norms. Soon afterwards, Bauermeister moved, for a time, to New York and there gained international acclaim.

This book is the first to take a close look at those works in which Bauermeister gives importance to language as central to artistic expression. Cyphers, symbols and text fragments taken from science and nature, philosophy and mathematics, music and art, form the basis of sensual-poetic drawings, collages and objects. Bauermeister first won fame with her celebrated “lens boxes” in which convex glass, magnifiers and prisms merge with optically distorted images and words into a magical cabinet of wonder.