Mary Bauermeister

Mary Bauermeister (*1934) is regarded as the “mother” of the Fluxus movement. During the 1960s she set out from the United States and conquered the art world with her lens boxes and stone spirals. Her works are represented in many major museums including MoMa and the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. This magnificent volume presents her artistic, enchanted studio not far from Cologne.

The photographer Thomas Ko¨ster documented Mary Bauermeister’s property in Ro¨srath near Cologne over many years. The artist designed it over a period of almost 50 years with cottages, towers, circus wagons and her own works as well as those of many others, creating a magic cabinet of curiosities. The result was a unique documentation that shows Bauermeister’s house and garden as the fairy-tale kingdom which her ex-husband, the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, already knew in the 1980s.