On the occasion of her 90th birthday, the Kunstmuseum Bonn is dedicating a room in its collection presentation to the conceptual painter Rune Mields (*1935 in Münster, lives and works in Cologne). Numerous works by the artist have long been a permanent fixture in the museum’s collection. A donation from Prof. Dr Gerhard Pfennig, Bonn, has completed the collection since 2024, from which a selection of works, will now be shown in a single artist room in the museum’s collection presentation. The presentation is complemented by several loans from Galerie Judith Andreae, Bonn, which represents the artist.
Rune Mields has been working on a wide-ranging oeuvre for over 60 years. In it, she deals with networks of relationships between numbers and signs and fundamentally with the ambivalence between order and chaos, logic and contradiction. She develops highly complex visualisations of various mathematical-geometric systems, with questions about the magic square, Sanju prime numbers, central perspective or the mathematical foundations of Arabic ornaments. The artist is always concerned with ‘gaining clarity about the immanent structures’ of systems, which she translates into a tangible form through her painting.
Her approach becomes clear not least in the work Augustinus sagt… (1981/2010), in which a complex ornamentation is linked to a quote from the famous church scholar and Bishop of Hippo (354-430): ‘Everything has forms because it has numbers in it.’ Mields thus refers to a universal organising principle behind the visible. At the same time, her differentiated repertoire of painterly and thematic shades makes it clear that there are no simple truths and that a systematic organising principle always contains its opposite. As the artist herself aptly summarises: ‘The infinite space – expands’.