35. 35AR MARY BAUERMEISTER (1934-2023) 144% original signed, inscribed, dated and numbered '144% Original 1971 10 variations/10 Mary Bauermeister' (on a label on the reverse) assemblage of glass, optical lenses, stones and ink in painted wooden case Made in 1971 22 x 22 x 10.5 cm. This work is numbered 10/10 variations. This is an edition of 10 works, all different. A certificate of authenticity signed by the artist will be given to the buyer. Provenance Galleria Schwarz, Milan. Acquired from it by the current owner. Exhibitions Milan, Galleria Schwarz, Mary Bauermeister, 3-29 February 1972, n.p, listed. Milan, Studio Gariboldi, Mary Bauermeister, 29-31 March 2017, no. 13, p. 35, illustrated in colour. Mary Bauermeister is an extraordinary German artist. She traversed the major avant-garde movements of the twentieth century with fierce freedom, constructing a deeply personal body of work that resonates with, but is never limited to, the principles of Surrealism. Although she is often associated with Fluxus, experimental music and the conceptual arts, her artistic practice is also part of a surrealist dialectic, particularly in the way she questions the limits of perception, language and knowledge. His art does not seek to represent the world, but to question it in its invisible dimensions, often through hybrid compositions combining optical lenses, fragmented words, scientific symbols and mystical intuitions. Like the Surrealists, Bauermeister explores the unconscious, daydreams and parallel logics - not to escape from them, but to put them in tension with scientific rationality, which she hijacks with poetry and humour. In her famous "lens boxes", she plays with distorted vision and blurring, evoking a reality that is multiplied and elusive, where the artistic object becomes a mental space, a tool for perceiving the hidden marvellous. A striking example of this approach is the work presented here: a white box containing a complex cartographic background, combining fragments of text, geographical tracings and organic motifs, covered with glass lenses of varying sizes. Each lens transforms the content, enlarging it, fragmenting it or blurring it, creating a universe in constant transformation. The installation is as much a celestial map, an alchemical laboratory, as a scientific dream, and invites us to question our own way of perceiving reality. This approach echoes the thinking of André Breton, for whom beauty was 'convulsive', in other words the product of shock, paradox and enigma. Bauermeister cultivates an aesthetic of ambiguity, where the rational and the irrational coexist. His works are often open systems, mental cartographies, attempts to grasp the secret correspondences of the world. In this way, she invented a post-modern surrealism, nourished by science, spirituality and a feminine, intuitive outlook that was rare in avant-garde circles dominated by male figures. Her art, at once cerebral and sensitive, is a quest for balance between opposing forces - the visible and the invisible, order and chaos, the rigour of calculation and the strangeness of dreams - as if each work sought to formulate a new grammar of reality, between science and magic.