Mary Bauermeister studied at two art academies in the mid 1950s but left both after a short time. She spent about a year at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm and the Hochschule für Kunst und Handwerk in Saarbrücken. Works from this period include abstract and non-representational paintings on canvas, reliefs, and drawings that oscillate between Constructivism, Art Informel and the emerging Zero movement.

By the end of the 1950s she had moved to Cologne, where her attic studio became a meeting place for the avant-garde. Art, music, architecture and poetry were embraced and artists such as Nam June Paik (1932-2006), John Cage, Otto Piene (1928-2014), David Tudor and Karlheinz Stockhausen presented their interdisciplinary, intermedial and performative experiments. In this context M. Bauermeister is usually reduced to the role of host, as her own artistic work developed in a different direction.

Around 1960, M. Bauermeister began creating her own aesthetic of many-valuedness. From this point onwards her oeuvre became increasingly diverse in terms of media, techniques and materials. The result was an intrinsic reference system that linked the individual artworks with each other by means of comments and allusions in writing, drawing, object and image. With many-valuedness, she referred to the philosophical discipline of logic; several contrasting statements all have the same truth value.

Her first institutional recognition was a solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (1962), after which she moved to New York for almost ten years, where she had her most successful period. Acquisitions by MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden came next. She was included in exhibitions such as the Whitney Annual Exhibition (1964, 1966, 1968) and the Pittsburgh International Exhibition (1967). She also had an impressive network in New York: Christo (1935-2020) and Jeanne-Claude (1935-2009), Carolee Schneemann (1939-2019), Jasper Johns (b. 1930) and Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) were among her friends and fellow artists.

The many-valued aesthetic can be found in different groups of works and connects them: she created stone pictures such as Progressions (1963), assemblages such as Howevercall (1964), Light sheets such as Needless Needles (1963-1964) or Lens Boxes such as In Memory of Your Feelings or Hommage à Jasper Johns (1965) or I’m a Pacifist But War Pictures Are Too Beautiful (1966). Lens boxes are a hybrid between sculpture and picture, in which several layers of glass are covered with optical lenses and the works are also filled with drawings, materials and writing, creating a complex network of interconnections.

M. Bauermeister’s temporary withdrawal from the art world began with her return to Germany and the construction of a studio house and sculpture garden near Cologne in the 1970s. Especially in the 1980s and 1990s she devoted herself to the artistic design of gardens and the raising of her four children. From the 2000s onwards she began to increasingly revive her groups of works, followed by renewed success in the art world with solo exhibitions at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne (2004), the Smith College Museum of Art (2015) and the Kunsthalle zu Kiel (2022-2023).