From assemblage to printmaking, Hannelore Baron’s work connects psychological experience to the social and political conditions around us. Through her abstractions of interiority and external structure in the form of worn wooden boxes, vessels, and various enclosures, the artist explores what is seen—or hidden—on the surface in relation to our inner worlds. From her trauma growing up as a Jewish child in Nazi Germany, Baron’s emotive compositions speak to how the self is shaped by forces larger than oneself and how this state of smallness and instability feels in an enigmatic and tactile language. In turn, Baron’s material vocabulary and visual motifs conjure experiences of displacement and entrapment, of being barely held together or constrained in place.

The artist’s career began in the 1940s shortly after her family fled fascism in Europe to Portugal before moving to New York in 1942. Primarily self-taught, Baron experimented with a wide range of media, working with wood and wire beginning in the 1960s. In the 1970s, she developed a monoprinting technique using cutout shapes made from thin copper sheets, which were wrapped and bound then inked and hand pressed.

An avid reader of eastern philosophy, Baron’s use of found and handmade objects from disparate sources reflects the ways her work brought together multiple belief systems and personal perspectives. “The solution didn’t come only from my head,” she once said about her work. “It was lived out and worked out. It is a complete thing.” She was also fascinated by rituals for life and death across cultures.

Her formal interpretation of political conditions, disempowerment, and disenchantment in the face of unimaginable destruction, war, and fascist national agendas, is especially pronounced in Untitled (B74005), an assemblage made in 1974. Like much of her work from this decade, the sculpture takes the form of a small memorial or a box for safeguarding keepsakes or personal effects, as one might have had as a child, a soldier going to war, an immigrant packing up their most treasured objects.

Rather than representational depictions of suffering that can be easily read, Baron’s objects speak more elusively to a desire for protection and to how trauma exists in the mind, body, and across generations. In the work’s scratched and worn-down wooden surfaces, haunting totem-like figure resembling a children’s toy or spiritual relic, white pencil-drawn arrows, and moments of stitching with string or nailed wire suggest a futile effort at repair and healings. As such, the vessel is a stand-in for memory and grief as they take on a material, physical presence beyond simple legibility or rationalization.

In 1977, Baron began showing with notable New York galleries, such as ​​Kathryn Markel Gallery and then several years later, at Gallery Schlesinger-Boisanté. In 1989, she had her first major museum survey at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. In 2002, a retrospective of works on paper was organized by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Services, curated by Ingrid Schaffner, which traveled throughout the country.