Collages and Box Constructions
April 19 – June 8, 2001

Throughout her adult life, Hannelore Baron made collages and box constructions in her home in Riverdale, New York.  Whether working in two or three dimensions, her art-making was a private pursuit.  Never intending her work for public display, Baron considered these works like the pages of a diary or keepsakes on a shelf.  Using found boxes with hinged lids, Baron’s sculptures open and close like gameboards or books.  Inside the boxes are meticulously arranged found artifacts – a child’s small blocks, wood spools or dominos, scraps of cloth - often neatly configured and tied with bits of wire or thread.  Each collage is made of fragments of cloth and paper, painted and printed with primitive figures and inscribed with Baron’s cryptic writing.

An avid reader of texts on archeology and anthropology, Baron was influenced by ancient ceremonies that marked  the passage of life and death.  Her art contains its own ritual element that invites the viewer to decode the multitude of signs and symbols within each work.  Like the German artist Joseph Beuys, Baron’s art imagines an ideal primitive state or motherland with its own language, customs, and forms. 

Born in 1926 in Saarland, Germany, Hannelore Baron was irrevocably touched by the rise of Nazism.  She witnessed the brutal attack on her father on Kristallnacht, November 8, 1938 and  that same year, following a brief period spent in hiding and separated from her parents, she fled Germany with her family.  They settled in New York in 1941, where Baron studied first textiles then painting, while also exploring her interest in Asian philosophies. She married, had two children, and only began making collages around 1960.  Baron died of cancer in 1987 and left behind a body of work imbued with an honesty and fragility that speaks to the human condition.

Hannelore Baron’s work was the subject of a one-person show at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1989.  Most recently, her work was included in the exhibition Deep Storage:Collecting, Storing, and Archiving in Art, presented at P.S.1 in Long Island City in 1998. A traveling exhibition of her work organized by SITES is planned to open summer of 2001.  Baron’s last one-person show in New York was in 1995. 

Gallery hours are Tuesday-Friday 10 to 6; Saturday 11 to 6.  The gallery will be closed Memorial Day weekend.  For further information please call 212-213-6767.