NEW YORK, NY.- Michael Rosenfeld Gallery is presenting Mary Bauermeister: St.one-d, the gallery’s third solo exhibition exploring the work of Mary Bauermeister (1934–2023). Featuring 31 works, including Progressions, Spirals, and lens boxes produced over the entirety of the artist’s career, the presentation reveals the consistent use of stones throughout Bauermeister’s oeuvre. With the earliest work included dated 1959 and the latest 2018, St.one-d elucidates the various and interconnecting throughlines in Bauermeister’s practice and underscores the longevity of her investigations into the natural world, mathematical order, and the cosmos.

Three paintings from the late 1950s open the exhibition, representing a significant prelude to Bauermeister’s stone works. Rendered in a neutral palette and featuring a dizzying array of pigment, these works are exemplary of her dot paintings, which the artist viewed as crucial progenitors to her stone works. As Bauermeister noted: “From 1958 to 1962, I did some pictures called constructive pointillism or constructive tachisme, meaning dots of paint on top of each other. When I saw these incredible stones on the beach I stacked stones on top of each other instead of color. My first stone piece created entirely of stones dates back to 1962 and from then on I have collected stones for decades of my life.”[2] Bauermeister’s very first stone work, the monumental Sand Stein Kugel Gruppe (1962), is featured prominently. Comprising seven panels and juxtaposing natural material and imagery with celestial-like orbs and a precise, mathematical structure, this work was included shortly after its creation in the artist’s first 1962 museum exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam to great acclaim.

After creating her first “stone pictures,” Bauermeister continued to gather her chosen material from around the world, sourcing smooth stones from Mediterranean beaches, round spherical stones from the shores of the Atlantic, white stones from Greece, and pink stones from the Adriatic coast. Returning to her studio, Bauermeister would sort her stones by size and color before meticulously stacking them to create “towers,” which she would subsequently arrange based on principles of progression; as the towers grow higher, the stones diminish in width. A 6-minute excerpt from the full-length cinematic portrait Mary Bauermeister - One and One is Three (2020), directed by Carmen Belaschk and produced by Paul Smaczny and Günter Atteln at Accentus Music, offers a glimpse into the artist’s process. Formatted specially for the exhibit, the excerpt comprises scenes of Bauermeister, dressed in all white, combing the shores of Brittany, France interspersed with archival footage of the artist on a beach from Der Wundergarten der Mary Bauermeister, a 1979 documentary directed by Bodo Kessler. Reflecting on the artist’s conceptual process, multivalent practice, and perennial use of natural materials, noted art historian Hans Ulrich Obrist wrote, “Everything comes together. Not just all disciplines, but nature too.”[3]

The breadth of Bauermeister’s stone works—ranging from the serial ordering of the Progressions to the spiritual nature of the Mandalas, and to the organic, all-over appearance of Chaos-Series (2015)—signals the enduring material and conceptual importance of stones to her practice. Indeed, the exhibition takes its title from a grouping of works executed between the late 1960s and the 2010s that play with the word stone in their titles. Manipulating letters as she would stones, Bauermeister created works like ST.ONE Instead of N-ever (1967), St-one-d (1962-2003), and St.oned (1986-2019) that highlight her signature sense of humor and interest in both verbal and visual puns.

Similarly, Bauermeister’s enigmatic lens boxes not only revel in but depend on double meanings, puns, and games created by visual tricks. The artist began this body of work in 1963 by arranging magnifying lenses of differing sizes and strengths within and outside of wooden boxes. The two works titled Brian O'Doherty Commentary Box (1964-2017 and 1967-2017) are exemplary of these compositions, with examples of the artist’s stone works in miniature, orbs, and evocative words or phrases populating their frames. As objects, images, and words are activated by the distortion and magnification of the lenses, the transformative nature of language is revealed and a multidimensional mode of seeing is encouraged. Titled after the critic who praised Bauermeister’s first American exhibition, these lens boxes additionally speak to Bauermeister’s simultaneously humorous and profound examination of her role as an artist.

Bauermeister’s self-reflective tendency is also evident in Stone with Easel (1969-70), a work that suggests a bird's-eye view of the artist’s workstation. Traditional materials like paint, boards, and pencils appear alongside those preferred by Bauermeister: stones, glass, and sand, a juxtaposition that emphasizes the artist’s radical use of natural and found materials. A similar contrast is created between the precise structure of the central element and the jumble of stones, spilled paint, broken pencils, and the small shoe that surround it. Presenting a collision of order and chaos, of tradition and novelty, of exteriority and introspection, this work offers crucial insight into Bauermeister’s multi-faceted process, inviting the viewer into her imaginative realm where creativity and irony reigned and her sense of the natural world, the greater galaxy, and spirituality spurred her tireless practice.

Mary Bauermeister: St.one-d is testament to the innovative unconventional spirit that defines Bauermeister’s oeuvre. The works included in this wide-ranging exhibition celebrate the themes central to the artist’s practice and make visual her fascination with the simultaneous transience and persistence of the natural world, her optical experiments in transparency and magnification, and her endless examination of the relationships between variation and multiplication, progression and order, and chance and chaos.

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery has represented Mary Bauermeister (1934–2023) since 2018. The gallery previously mounted two solo exhibitions of the artist’s work: Mary Bauermeister: Live in Peace or Leave the Galaxy in 2019 and Mary Bauermeister: Fuck the System in 2023.


[1] Mary Bauermeister, Mary Bauermeister - One and One is Three, video directed by Carmen Belaschk, produced by Accentus Music, 2020.
[2] Mary Bauermeister, quoted in Sindelfingen, Germany, 2006.
[3] Hans Ulrich Obrist, “Hans Ulrich Obrist in Conversation with Mary Bauermeister,” published in 1 + 1 = 3: die Kunstwelten der Mary Bauermeister, ed. Regina Göckede and Anette Hüsch (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, 2022), 65.