Bettina
1,000 Photos of Structured Relativity, c. 1980 (exact date unknown)
Silver gelatin print, paper, pencil
Booklet; 8 x 4.5 in (each page)
Unique
Courtesy of the artist

Bettina (b. 1928, Brooklyn, NY) is an artist working across media, including sculpture, photography, painting, printmaking, film, drawing, and text. She is a longtime resident of the Chelsea Hotel in New York, storied home of famous artists and writers. Based on the observation of the city’s daily activities, Bettina’s work transforms movements and gestures into form in an effort to apprehend the elusive, transitory energies of urban life. Many of her 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. The American abstract artist’s 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.