On the death of the conceptual artist Rune Mields: Understanding the world as a set of numbers

The artist with the striking red head could be tough, but a career as a painter wasn’t necessarily in the cards for her. Born in Münster, she initially completed an apprenticeship as a bookseller in her hometown and only came to art via a detour. In 1968, together with the busy cultural journalist Klaus Honnef and the sculptor Benno Werth, she was one of the founders of the Aachen art association Gegenverkehr, a legendary avant-garde meeting place that only existed for four years, where, among others, Mel Ramos, Daniel Spoerri and Günther Uecker performed.

Rune Mields also showed her early tube paintings here, which, however, have only now returned to public consciousness on the occasion of her ninetieth birthday exhibition in the Bonn Art Museum. It wasn’t until 1970 that the energetic doer – now based in Cologne, where she worked in her studio until the end – finally decided to become a freelance artist. This was also the beginning of her ongoing interest in numbers and systems.

Scriptural signs, figures of cave paintings

The fascination for numbers and symbols, order and chaos, logic and contradiction runs like a common thread through her work. “To understand life, you have to understand mathematics,” was one of Rune Mields’ beliefs. Her mathematical art with geometric shapes and columns of numbers may have been cumbersome, but at the same time she knew how to break down the perception of the world into clear images. “It was done the same way in the Stone Age,” she explained succinctly in the Monopol interview. Scriptural symbols therefore also appeared in her paintings, along with figures reminiscent of cave paintings.

In 1977, Documenta maker Manfred Schneckenburger became aware of her and brought her to Kassel for the sixth edition. This was probably an important confirmation for the autodidact, as was her appointment as a visiting professor at the Berlin University of the Arts in 1984. Five years later he was invited to the Villa Massimo in Rome as a guest of honor. In recognition of her life’s work and her commitment to other artists, she received the Gabriele Münter Prize in 2000.

The painter had long since set a keystone for herself. In 1992, under the title “Life runs like a flowing river,” she created her grave as an angular, gradually rising slab path on a meadow in the artists’ cemetery in Kassel, not far from Wilhelmshöhe Castle. “Mathematics becomes visible to the viewer when he follows the letters that mark all prime numbers between 1 and 100,” reads the instructions for visitors to the necropolis.

Rune Mields died on June 27th in Cologne at the age of 91. At her request, she will be buried in Kassel.