Lothar Baumgarten’s projects consistently probe the logic beneath the structures of Western systems of representation – self/other, seer/seen and nature/culture – in order to work on the discursive and contextual sites of its inscription. In the late 1960s, alongside his studies at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Baumgarten began to engage the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, specially his nature/culture opposition. He was awarded the Golden Lion at the 41st Venice Biennial, América Señores Naturales (1984), and the Lichtwark Prize from the city of Hamburg in 1996. Recent projects as Autofocus Retina (MACBA, 2008), and Seven Sounds, Seven Circles (Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2009) have explored Baumgarten’s last approaches to the relationship of what he describes as a “dramatic dialogue” between nature and culture.
