NEW YORK, NY.- Pavel Zoubok Gallery is presenting Omniverse, an exhibition of recent and historical works by German multi-media artist Mary Bauermeister (b. 1934). This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York since 1972.

Mary Bauermeister burst onto the scene in 1962 with a series of museum and gallery exhibitions that quickly established her as one of a handful of women who achieved mainstream success during this fertile period of American Art. Bauermeister is best known for her signature lens boxes and multi-layered constructions that combine dense expanses of pen and ink drawing with objects and optical lenses to create nebular symphonies of language, form and subtly articulated color. Intricately composed accumulations of smooth, rounded beach stones are also central to her practice. In their meticulous arrangement, these aptly named “howevercalls” propose an alternative pictorial language rooted in spirituality, mathematics and poetry.

Omniverse includes major works from the 1960s and early-1970s, including Sand-Stein-Kugelgruppe from 1962, which was first exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and later in the artist’s New York debut, at Galería Bonino in 1964. This important wall construction showcases her complimentary interests in logical and emotional intelligences, gracefully balancing panels of meticulous stone progressions and painted, elliptical motifs. Like many of her works, which delighted and confounded critics, Sand-Stein-Kugelgruppe engages aspects of Dada, Fluxus, Concrete Poetry and even Minimalism. In a 1970 review for The New York Times, James R. Mellow approvingly contrasted exhibitions by Bauermeister and Donald Judd, presciently musing:

Bauermeister’s view of art, one might say, is humorous, ebullient, optimistic – based on the expansive principle that art, ideas about art, the artist’s response to art, the visual materials of art, and the history of art itself will go on spawning art ad infinitum.

Mary Bauermeister’s work is in numerous public collections including The Museum of Modern Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim, The Whitney Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, The Hirshorn Museum and The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. She has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions in museums around the world including the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Museum Ludwig in her native Cologne. A recent survey of her New York period at Smith College Art Museum was the first monographic exhibition in an American museum. This is her first solo exhibition with Pavel Zoubok Gallery.