Mildred Thompson: Frequencies

Mildred Thompson’s artistic journey traversed continents and disciplines, resulting in a body of work that bridges science, music, and abstraction. Thompson's multifaceted practice draws from scientific research and a poetic pursuit of abstraction to explore the limits of perception, visualizing extremes of scale—from the human body and built environments to microscopic particles and the vastness of the cosmos. After relocating from the United States to Germany in the late 1950s, Thompson created surreal, figurative drawings and etchings, often depicting female figures. In the late 1960s and 1970s, her focus shifted to built environments, as seen in her “Wood Pictures” series—abstract minimalist compositions made from found wood, reminiscent of architectural features and facades. Her explorations continued with the “Window Paintings” (1977), where brightly colored, abstracted spaces appear framed by windows. Thompson's works on paper from the 1970s and ’80s highlight her inventive approach to printmaking and drawing, including the intricate intaglio prints of the “Death and Orgasm” series (1978) and expressive watercolors of celestial constellations like Pleiades III (1988). In the 1990s, she delved into invisible forces with paintings inspired by particle physics and quantum mechanics, such as “String Theory” (1999) and “Magnetic Fields” (1991). A significant selection of her “Heliocentric Series” (c. 1990–94) is on display for the first time in over three decades, presented alongside her monumental “Music of the Spheres” (1996) paintings, each depicting a different planet and accompanied by Thompson's original electronic music compositions titled Cosmos Calling.