Hannelore Baron was an artist whose work has become known for the highly personal, book-sized, abstract collages and box constructions that she began exhibiting in the late 1960s. Born in Saarbrücken, Germany, on June 8, 1926, she and her family fled persecution in Nazi Germany in 1938 and relocated to the Riverdale, Bronx area of New York City. Without a formal art education, her interest grew and was nourished through a variety of art classes at adult education and community centers.

At age 40, in the mid 1960s, Baron combined her knowledge of a variety of art making techniques (watercolor, drawing and printmaking) and began making her first collages. Baron embarked on an uncharted voyage into collage as a method of containing her search for human connection. Her mysterious and intriguing works of ink, paper and fabric are eloquent testimonials to the common heritage of humanity. Plunging deep into an expression of the common roots by means of personal suffering, she developed a cohesive language through the weaving of texture, shape and symbol. Her transcendent communication expresses the reassurance of the continuum of nature’s cycles reflected by the injection of new life to old fabrics.

Hannelore Baron works reveal the path by which an artist’s self-discovery transcends into universal expression. Working in the form of two-dimensional collage and box assemblage, Baron explored the archeology of the soul. In the early 1970s, Baron established a studio and devoted her time and energy completely to her artwork. Although her compositions are completely abstract, she considered them to be both personal and political statements. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s her work garnered critical acclaim, along with gallery and museum exhibitions in the United States, Europe and Japan.

Her work is marked by the gravity, discretion and understated wit of a survivor. She had a special feeling for paper, for the weight of communication it can bear and the weight of history that settles so easily on its edges and surfaces. She described herself a pacifist and wanted her quietly intense work to convince others of the need to listen. She used letters as symbols of memory and birds as symbols of vulnerability and the need for song. She had numerous solo shows in New York and was a participant in ''Jewish Themes - Contemporary Artists II'' at the Jewish Museum. Although the diminutive collages and doll-size assemblages by Hannelore Baron clearly belong to the 20th Century, it's impossible to link them to a specific decade. Hannelore Baron died of cancer at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center on April 28, 1987. She was 61 years old.

In 1995, her work was the subject of a one-person exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. In 2001 her work was the subject of a traveling exhibition curated by Ingrid Schaffner and organized by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service. Her works can be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, and Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Real strangers to time's steady progression, these haunting works are timeless in a profoundly untraditional sense.