Bettina Pousttchi
Sculpture and Photography
Bettina Pousttchi
Sculpture and Photography
Bettina Pousttchi stands as one of Germany’s foremost contemporary artists and has received significant recognition internationally.
Solo exhibitions of her work have been held in institutions such as the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Phillips Collection in Washington DC, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and the Arts Club of Chicago. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at the MoCA Shanghai, the Aurora Museum Shanghai, the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn and the Museum Haus Konstruktiv in Zurich.
Bettina Pousttchi predominantly works with sculpture and photography. Her site-specific photo installations consistently challenge and expand the formal and conceptual possibilities of photography and often occupy entire building façades.
Pousttchi first attracted international attention in 2009 with her monumental photographic installation Echo, which covered the four elevations of the Temporäre Kunsthalle at Schlossplatz in Berlin. Echo was a visual echo of the former prestigious Palace of the Republic of the GDR, reflecting the urban history of Berlin and collective memory. Pousttchi explores the relationship between memory and history from a transnational perspective.
Pousttchi’s sculptural works provide deeper insight into her interest in the structures of public space, often developed from street objects like street bollards, crowd barriers or bike racks. Her recent sculptures Vertical Highways are transformations of guardrails. The vertical alignment and modular use of a prefabricated element change the viewer’s spatial perception and give the work an architectural reference. By applying techniques such as bending or pressing, and reconceiving their coloring, Pousttchi relieves these everyday objects of their regulatory function and detaches them from their context of meaning, turning them into signs of change, fluid structures and dissolving boundaries.
For her extensive photo project World Time Clock Pousttchi travelled over several years to different time zones around the world. In each place she took a photograph of a public clock always at the same time. The planetary piece about the political and social organization of time and space creates a philosophical image of synchronicity and a globalized reality.
A monumental sculpture from her Vertical Highways series is permanently installed in front of the Berlin Central Station.
Bettina Pousttchi was born in Mainz in 1971. She studied at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf and graduated from the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York. She lives in Berlin.