Synopsis "100° West - 80° East Meridian: The Great Circle from Pole to Pole"
This book is a monograph on recent work from Barbara Westermann who is a German-American social sculptor and installation artist living in New York City and Berlin. Her sculptures, prints, and drawings are minimalist and conceptual, with an emphasis on urban planning, geometry, geophysical mapping, and music. She uses sculpture to 'embody' utilitarian objects and create structures in society using language, thoughts, actions and objects. Barbara's research-driven methodology uses digital maps and historical documents with a utilitarian regard for aesthetics and materials. She uses the visual vocabulary of urban planning and architecture for her works of sculpture, public art, and printmaking. She is interested in crossing the boundaries between art and life, Barbara - in her sculptures, works on paper and installation - responds to information drawn from a range of human environments, including architecture, urban planning and socio-political history. The magic of numbers and proportions of the human body in Da Vinci's Man of Vitruvius are measured by a circle and a square; Barbara, in the company of contemporary artists like Olafur Eliasson, Joseph Beuys and Hilma af Klint, with their laboratories of spatial research, start with maps, landscapes, natural processes, things that already are, to build visions and dreams about what might be.Barbara has shown her sculptures and art work widely, including solo exhibitions at Malkasten in Düsseldorf Germany, La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, and Freiburg Museum of Contemporary Art. She delivered a lecture called 'documenta urbana' at the documenta XIII in Kassel, Germany and completed a fellowship at the Raketenstation Stiftung Hombroich in the fall of 2012. She worked on the Joseph Beuys 7000 Oaks project while studying urban planning and ever since I've practiced art in such an interdisciplinary way.Her work has been shown at the Tate in London, the Whitney Biennial, PS1, the Dia Art Foundation, Paula Cooper Gallery, Holly Solomon Gallery, Ronald Feldman Gallery, EAB Fair, Clay Street Gallery, Momenta Art, Proteus Gowanus, the Museum of the National Library of Spain, Brooklyn Museum, Hamburger + Munchner Kunstverein, Hamburg/Munich, Germany, New Museum for Contemporary Art, and numerous other venues in the United States and Europe. A Whitney Museum Independent Study graduate, she publishes prints with Clay Street Press in Cincinnati.Publications include Art of the Millennium, by Burkhardt Riemschneider; Blurring the Boundaries: Installation Art 1969-1996, essays by Hugh Davies and Ron Onorato, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Show and Tell: A Chronicle of Group Material; Whitney Museum Biennial Exhibition 1985; ABC No Rio Dinero; Time Capsule, Creative Time; Editor, Kunstforum International, Nr. 51, Kassel, 1980
