PASADENA, CA.- The New York Times in reporting her death wrote “…Her work is marked by the gravity, discretion, and wit of a survivor. She had a special feeling for paper, for the weight of communication it can bear and the weight of history that settles so easily on its edges and surfaces. She described herself as a pacifist and wanted her quietly intense work to convince others of the need to listen. She used letters as symbols of memory and birds as symbols of vulnerability and the need for song…"

Los Angeles Times critic, Christopher Knight, wrote: “Baron’s fragile little boxes have the authentic intensity of potent memento mori. Once seen, they’re not easily forgotten.”

Hannelore Baron was first introduced to Los Angeles and West Coast audiences by Jack Rutberg Fine Arts in 1984, and has presented five solo exhibitions of her works, including one in 1989, concurrent with the memorial tribute exhibition presented by the Guggenheim Museum in New York. A major retrospective was also presented by the Saarland Museum, Saarbruken West Germany.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s her work garnered critical acclaim, with gallery and museum exhibitions in the United States, Europe, and Japan. and in 2001 was the subject of a traveling exhibition organized by the Smithsonian Institution.

Among the many museums where her works can be found are The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, and Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

Hannelore Baron was born in Dillingen, Saarland, Germany. She experienced the early horrors of the Holocaust on the night of December 9, 1938, known as Kristallnacht, when Nazis pillaged Jewish businesses, synagogues, and houses, including Baron's home. After a series of moves throughout Europe, the family escaped to the United States in 1941, settling in New York City, where Baron studied applied design at the Straubenmuller Textile High School.

Baron's first collages, made in the early 1960s when she was in her 40s, were composed of old torn paper, ink, and watercolor. She later incorporated cloth, etchings, and monoprints into her work. In 1968, she began making box assemblages from various found items, including wood, discarded cloth, and string. She also constructed a series of black boxes, white boxes, and boxes of mysterious games with unusual game pieces. Many of her motifs, such as monoprints made from thin copper sheets, appear in both the collages and the assemblages.

Her intimate expressions reflected her interest in primitive art and ancient civilizations and their vestiges. Hannelore Baron’s work is a reaction to her humanistic concerns which, while they have their origins in the hardships endured as an adolescent in Germany in the 1930’s, dealt with current issues. The collages are paper and frayed cloth with drawing, at times containing her printed images, stitching, creasing, and tearing. Her assemblages often incorporated her collages, found objects, wood, paint, strings, and the like. Her works are notable for their remarkable poignancy and visceral impact that belie their intimate scale. In the numerous writings on her work,

Hannelore Baron is singled out as one of the foremost contemporary artists in her medium – “a spiritual sister to Paul Klee” in her work’s “heroic intimacy” and a “strong cohort of Kurt Schwitters in her formal ordering of human detritus.

Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, now located in Pasadena, is delighted to offer this work by Hannelore Baron for your consideration now on View in "ART A to Z" A Revolving Exhibition