Yto Barrada-Gallery Exhibition - Part 09

Bettina Grossman, known simply as “Bettina,” is a legendary artist whose prolific body of work includes sculpture, photography, painting, printmaking, film, drawing, and text. Bettina is a longtime resident of the Chelsea Hotel in New York, storied home of famous artists and writers from Dylan Thomas to Yves Klein to Sid Vicious. But the American abstract artists’ own unique oeuvre was rarely seen and largely overlooked by the art world until 2019 on the occasion of her two-woman show with Yto Barrada in New York. Barrada is also overseeing Bettina’s first catalogue raisonné. After living and working in Europe for ten years between the 1950s and 60s, Bettina returned to New York. Following the loss of her work in a fire that destroyed her studio in 1968 she moved to Chelsea where she still lives and works in her original apartment. Based on the observation of the city’s daily activities, her work transforms movements and gestures into form in an effort to apprehend the elusive, transitory energies of urban life. Many of Bettina’s series are made within a set of rules, seeking out pattern and distortion, play and discipline, within form. Patterns and shapes appear and disappear across sculptural, drawing and photographic series, referring to a circular and mystical internal logic.