Lothar Baumgarten Autofocus Retina in Barcelona

This is the first retrospective exhibition in Spain by this German artist from Rheinsberg, 1944. The son of an anthropologist, Baumgarten lived for several years with an indigenous tribe in the Venezuelan Amazon region, and in the sixties he became one of the first artists to explore representations of minority cultures and their absence from western cultural representation. Interested precisely in the idea of “the Other” and how it is portrayed in history, Baumgarten’s work uses objects, images and the written word to stimulate reflection about conditions of exchange and travel in relation to geography and the accumulation of history.

The exhibition will focus particularly on Baumgarten’s photographic work, particularly through such series as Carbon (1989) and Montaigne (1985), veritable visual essays and summaries of his entire production.