Guided tour to "Lothar Baumgarten. autofocus retina"

By Bartomeu Marí

This is the first retrospective exhibition in Spain by this German artist (Rheinsberg, 1944). The son of an anthropologist, Baumgarten lived for several years with an indigenous tribe in the Venezuelan Amazon region, and in the 1960s 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.