Exhibition Detail - Samuelis Baumgarte Galery

Ruth Baumgarte

About the exhibition

We are pleased to inform you that due to the great response to the Ruth Baumgarte 100th Birthday Exhibition in our gallery we have extended the exhibition until August 26, 2023.

The exhibition curated by the Ruth Baumgarte Art Foundation to mark her 100th birthday presents more than 70 outstanding works from six decades, showing highlights of the life's work of the painter and draftswoman Ruth Baumgarte from June 21 to July 22. Typical of her representational working method is how the artist combines precarious social issues with the evocative radiance of color from a humanistic stance. Documentary films on the life and work of Ruth Baumgarte can be seen in the exhibition's basement.

On the occasion of Ruth Baumgarte's (1923-2013) 100th birthday on 27.6.2023 and a few months after the successful exhibition at the Albertina in Vienna, the Ruth Baumgarte Art Foundation is hosting a ceremony at the Bielefeld Altstädter Nicolai Church. More than 400 invited guests from culture, society and business are expected on Tuesday, June 20, 2023 at 4:00 pm.

The event will be streamed live and exclusively on the Instagram channels @kunststiftungruthbaumgarte and @samuelisbaumgarte.

Charity event in favor of Bethel

As a benefit for the new Bethel Children's Hospital, the Art Foundation is posthumously publishing a special edition of three original serigraphs by the artist. Two watercolors and a drawing by Ruth Baumgarte are the models for these serigraphs reproduced on high-quality fine art paper, authorized and hand-numbered by an estate stamp. Each of the three limited edition serigraphs is published in an edition of 40 copies + 10 a.p. at a price of € 2,900, of which the Art Foundation donates € 2,000 per sheet sold to the Bethel Children's Center.

Ruth Baumgarte, born in Coburg in 1923, grew up in the metropolis of Berlin from 1925. The atmosphere and the people in Berlin of the "Golden Twenties" will shape her for life. Coming from an old family of actors and having been in contact with theater and film from childhood, the arts were close to her heart. In the early 1940s, she began her studies in graphic arts and drawing at the Staatliche Hochschule für bildende Künste in Berlin. During this time, she became a passionate draftswoman, closely observing her surroundings with a sharp pen and pencil. At the same time, she became acquainted with the watercolor technique and discovered the expressiveness of color as the driving energy of her creative work, which would lead her to new interpretations in her late work beginning in the 1980s.

Ruth Baumgarte's work is focused on reality. But she turns in her paintings to the inner experienced in ever new formulations. In this point she follows the German Romanticism, as a viewer to look at a world and thereby watch the longings and hopes of the ideal fail.

Africa, the enigmatic continent with its power, but also its great social and political changes, becomes the impulse of her brilliant color-saturated late work, which ushers in the international reception of her work.

Her oeuvre has been exhibited in major international museums, galleries and institutions, most recently at the Marble Palace in St. Petersburg and the Albertina, Vienna. A year before Ruth Baumgarte died in 2013, she founded an art foundation named after her, which has since looked after her estate and annually awards a prestigious art prize to contemporary artists. A three-volume catalog raisonné was published by Hirmer Verlag in early 2023. The comprehensive publication, which contains numerous specialist articles on the creative periods and descriptions of key works.

Opening hours of the gallery

Monday - Friday from 10:00 - 18:00 h and Saturday from 10:00 - 14:00 h