ENTBRANNT - Fine Arts Students Meet Mary Bauermeister

ENTBRANNT - Fine Arts Students Meet Mary Bauermeister

A fire in Mary Bauermeister’s studio building in Oberagger in April 2019 was the catalyst for a very special art project. The internationally renowned artist approached painting professor Ulrika Eller-Rüter to ask whether she and her art students would take up the idea of her “World Cultural Heritage” project and, together, create something new out of the material chaos left by the fire.

In July 2019, 14 students from ten different cultures spent ten days working intensively to redesign the wooden framework “World Cultural Heritage,” which Bauermeister had previously presented at the Mittelrhein Museum in Koblenz: “Heirlooms” and fragments of memory from culture and civilization, drawn from Mary Bauermeister’s collection and the fire-damaged room, were incorporated into the wooden sculpture at Alanus University and transformed into a new work of art through a dialogical process. As an individual response to the art project, the students also developed their own works, in which materials from Bauermeister’s “archives” and the fire-damaged room were in part used again.