A conversation between Lothar Baumgarten and Kaira Cabañas

The son of an anthropologist, from the beginning of his career as a student of Joseph Beuys' at the Academy in Düsseldorf, Baumgarten became interested in ethnography through reading Claude Lévi-Strauss, one of whose main methodologies is the opposition between nature and culture; a theme towards which Baumgarten's work is directed and which is already reflected in his first works, ephemeral in kind, which were photographed and grouped under the title Culture-Nature, Manipulated Reality (1968–1972). Baumgarten's œuvre precedes the interest aroused by indigenous cultures and "Otherness". Since the late-1960s the artist has demonstrated a special concern for the qualities of language as behavior and the sentient qualities of the materials employed (color and form) in works that utilize space as a blank page.