NEW YORK.- The Whitney Museum of American Art presents the American premiere of The Origin of the Night: Amazon Cosmos (1973-77), a rarely screened film by Lothar Baumgarten through November 30, 2003. Based on a Tupi Indian myth about the derivation of the night, the film depicts a fantastic landscape passing from night into day and back into night. The forest and river become an exotic cosmos of birds, animals, and aquatic life, which is gradually revealed to be a subtle artifice created out of debris and toxic waste in a section of the Rhine between Düsseldorf and Cologne. A symphonic soundtrack, composed of the natural sounds of the forest and punctuated by a dramatic thunderstorm, forms the underlying structure of this 98-minute film sculpture.

The exhibition at the Whitney was organized by Chrissie Iles, curator of film and video. A brochure essay has been written by Henriette Huldisch, curatorial coordinator of film and video.
Support for Lothar Baumgarten: The Origin of the Night is provided by the Goethe-Institut New York.

In “A Conversation with Lothar Baumgarten,” on Tuesday, October 14, at 6:30 pm, the artist will discuss his work with Chrissie Iles, the Whitney’s curator of film and video and curator of this exhibition. The event will take place at the Goethe-Institut New York, 1014 Fifth Avenue. Admission is free; for reservations and information, call the Goethe-Institut at (212) 439-8700.

Lothar Baumgarten was born in 1944, in Rheinsberg, Germany. He studied in the late 1960s under Joseph Beuys at the Düsseldorf Academy, and had his first exhibition at the Galerie Konrad Fischer, in Düsseldorf, in 1972. Internationally acclaimed since then, he has had innumerable solo and group shows over the past thirty years. Baumgarten has been the recipient of many awards, including the

Lichtwark Prize, City of Hamburg, Germany, 1997; The Golden Lion, First Prize of 41st Venice Biennial, Venice, Italy, 1984; Prize of the County of Nordrhein Westfalen, Germany, 1976; and Prize of the City of Düsseldorf, Germany, 1974.

The Whitney Museum of American Art is the leading advocate of 20th- and 21st-century American art. The Permanent Collection is the world’s preeminent collection of 20th-century American art and includes the entire artistic estate of Edward Hopper, the largest public collection of works by Alexander Calder, Louise Nevelson, and Lucas Samaras, as well as significant works by Arshile Gorky, Marsden Hartley, Jasper Johns, Reginald Marsh, Agnes Martin, Georgia O’Keeffe, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, and Ad Reinhardt, among other artists. With its history of exhibiting the most promising and influential American artists and provoking intense critical and public debate, the Biennial – the Whitney’s signature show – has become a measure of the state of contemporary art in America today.