Yto Barrada
YTO BARRADA
Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge
extended until May 30th, 2020
YTO BARRADA
Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge
extended until May 30th, 2020
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.
She has been the subject of several films, including Bettina (S. Bassett, 2008) and Girl with Black Balloons (C. van der Borch, 2010). Her most recent exhibition The Power of Two Suns was on view at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Governor’s Island exhibition space in New York, Fall 2019.