Over the last four and a half decades, Lothar Baumgarten (b. 1944) has drawn wide acclaim and respect for his powerful body of work, centred on ethnography and anthropology.

He has used a wide range of media to question the very core ideas and systems of representation – from ephemeral sculptures, to photography, slide projections, 16 mm film works, recordings, drawings, prints, books, short stories, as well as site-specific works and wall drawings and architecture-related interventions.

‘America Señores Naturales’ retraces the history of one of Baumgarten’s most famous site-specific interventions from 1984, ‘Señores Naturales’ and uses it as a point of departure to delve back into the key concepts surrounding his oeuvre, with a special focus on the artist’s early years.

Featuring a large selection of images from the artist’s archive, published here for the first time, this volume offers an insight into Baumgarten’s process and practice.

In a newly commissioned essay, author Joanna Vickery-Barkow retraces the importance of the act of naming as well as its historical implications in Baumgarten’s work, and demonstrates how his art was responsive to both “the spatial properties and history of the sites where he exhibited”, particularly in the context of the Venice Biennale and the German Pavilion.

Published with Marian Goodman Galleries.