Lothar Baumgarten

Born 1944 in Rheinsberg, Germany, Baumgarten attended the Staatliche Akademie der bildenden Künste, Karlsruhe (1968), and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (1969–71), where he studied for a year under Joseph Beuys.

The eighty Ektachromes that comprise Baumgarten's slide projection Unsettled Objects (1968–69) show artifacts at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, displayed much as they were when it was opened to the public in 1874.

[9] A later work, El Dorado – Gran Sabana (1977–85), juxtaposes photographs of the rich landscape of the La Gran Sabana region, the site of the legendary El Dorado, which Baumgarten took in 1977 with the names of heavy metals and minerals mined in the area during the 1980s; the names of indigenous animals being exterminated by the mining process are linked with the metals and minerals.

[4] When he represented Germany at the 1984 Venice Biennale, his work Señores Naturales consisted of the names of Amazonian peoples engraved on a marble floor and filled with resin.

[2] In Accès aux quais (tableaux parisiens) (1985–6), Baumgarten displayed a Metro line map, the names of the stations altered to refer to French colonial activity.

[6] For Carbon (1989), an installation composed chiefly of bars of color and typographically crisp words, he mapped two overlapping histories around the gallery walls: The network of railroads integral to the settling of the American West and the homes of the indigenous tribes who were displaced, imprisoned or eradicated.

[14][15] The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles commissioned Baumgarten to create a work that incorporated the photo documentation of his trip; however, the intended piece was never realized.

[18][19] In 1994, Baumgarten landscaped the modern medium-sized woodland garden full of weeds and wild flowers for the Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain designed by Jean Nouvel.