Lothar Baumgarten (born in Rheinsberg, 1944 – died 2018) was a German conceptual artist associated with New York and Berlin, whose work ranged across installation, film and photography. He studied in Karlsruhe and at the Düsseldorf Academy, where he spent a year under Joseph Beuys. His first solo exhibition took place at Galerie Konrad Fischer in Düsseldorf in 1972.
His early projects examined how European ethnographic museums shape the viewer's gaze. The slide piece Unsettled Objects (1968–69) records artifacts at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, displayed much as they were when the museum opened to the public in 1874. Between 1977 and 1986 he travelled to Brazil and Venezuela, and from 1978 to 1980 he lived for eighteen months with a Yanomami community in the upper Orinoco. These stays produced works such as Terra Incognita, a three-dimensional diagram of the border between the two countries, and the film The Origin of the Night, on the Brazilian rainforest and Tupi creation stories.
He also addressed the railroads and indigenous peoples of North America, as in Carbon (1989), where railway names preserve the designations of communities that were displaced. He represented Germany at the 1984 Venice Biennale, where he won the Golden Lion. His legacy lives on in collections such as the Reina Sofía and the Tate, and in his teaching at the Universität der Künste Berlin from 1994.
Teachers and pupils
Studied with
- Joseph Beuys 1921–1986