Lothar Baumgarten

Lothar Baumgarten

(Rheinsberg, Germany, 1944 – Berlin, 2018)

Lothar Baumgarten, son of an anthropologist, inherited from his father a desire for knowledge and confrontation with realities that are far away and different from the European one. His works (sculptures, films, photographs, wall drawings and installations) draw inspiration mainly from his travels and periods spent among the Native peoples of North and South America.

In his works, Baumgarten combines reality and imagination to express his anthropological research, his reflections on the difficult process of encounter between different civilizations in human history and issues related to colonialism.

His early works refer to the origins of the German anthropological practice in the 18th century: telling about a place without ever having seen it, relying only on research from archives and materials available in his own country. Baumgarten exposes the absurd claim to understand and study “the other from us” by adopting this method.

The installation at the Castello di Rivoli Yurupari – Rheinsberg Room (1984) refers to his birthplace in its title, the city of Rheinsberg in Eastern Germany, in connection with another imaginary place. In various spots on the walls of the room there are the original names of plants and animals that inhabit tropical America, names that belong to an erased culture following the appropriation of these lands by Europeans.

The space of the room, in which the walls are covered with blue pigment, just leaning on the walls, not fixed, is fragile and volatile, such as the idea of a continent that is simply imagined from a distance, through the descriptions of books read in a Rheinsberg room. The pigment used to color the walls expresses also the precariousness in which tropical places live.

The work is created in a historic room of the castle, the Falconers’ Room, which features decorations painted in the late 18th century, inspired by a natural landscape: figures of birds surrounded by greenery and flowers, in a kind of ideal country scene.

Yurupari – Rheinsberg Room by Baumgarten deals with the theme of “Time” in two ways: historical time, through its relationship to the architectural context in which he makes the work, and present time, through the choice of the employed materials.