The Von der Heydt-Museum Wuppertal is dedicating an exhibition to the German artist Lothar Baumgarten (1944-2018) with works from the Lothar Schirmer Collection. This is the first time the artist is honoured in a German museum since his death six years ago. The exhibition is embedded in the new collection presentation "Times and Spaces", with which it interacts and opens up new interpretations. Baumgarten's work revolved around the question of the familiar and the foreign, it dealt with distant spaces that the European eye and European politics attempted to conquer.
Lothar Baumgarten studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1968 to 1972, among others, with Joseph Beuys. He participated in the documenta several times and received the Golden Lion at the 1984 Venice Biennale for his work "America Señores Naturales", among numerous other honours. As early as the 1970s, Baumgarten was interested in the European view of foreign cultures. In 1978/79, he travelled to the Amazon region and lived there for 18 months with two Yanomami tribes on the upper Orinoco in Venezuela. In addition to his photographs, his installation works are particularly impressive, as they have a sensual and haptic effect and at the same time subtly stimulate reflection on global and socio-political issues.
