We are delighted to participate at Independent New York with a solo presentation of works by Berlin based artist Bettina Pousttchi.

Join us at booth 307. We look forward to welcoming you.

Vertical Highways
 

The sculptures from the Vertical Highways series are made from guardrails, which the artist has transformed and arranged into new compositions. For several years, Bettina Pousttchi has used objects in her sculptures that structure the physical experience of the urban space, including crowd barriers, street bollards, and guardrails. By applying techniques like bending, pressing, or changing their color, the Berlin based artist relieves these everyday objects of their regulatory function and detaches them from their context of meaning, transforming them into signs of change, fluidity, and dissolving boundaries. With her serial use of the source material, the artist conceptually draws on Minimal Art as well as on Marcel Duchamp‘s ready-mades.

Horizons
 

With her new series Horizons Bettina Pousttchi continues her conceptual approach to an expanded notion of photography, bringing together photographic methods with painterly means. The artist applied acrylic paint to identically sized canvases in a variety of monochrome colours ranging from vivid red to white and purple, carefully preserving the subtle brushstrokes of the painterly gesture. They serve as the ground for full-format abstract photographic motifs applied using a manual screen-printing process. The motifs allude to the artist’s highly acclaimed photo installation Echo, which covered as a photo print on paper the entire façade of the Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin in 2009/2010 to create a three-dimensional photomontage that evoked the Palast der Republik, a building which had been demolished shortly before on the same site.

The artist photographed sections of these paper prints showing the strikingly reflective window surfaces of the Palast. Captured in these motifs are details from the original photographic print now bearing the marks of natural weathering over a period of six months. The work thus forms a layered depiction of past time and the physical traces it leaves in our environment. It functions both as trace of the real and as containers of temporality and memory. Horizons underscores the artist’s interest in questions of photography’s materiality and indexicality today and is also emblematic of ongoing processes of urban change in Berlin and in other cities. 

Earthworks
 

The colourfully glazed ceramic sculptures also draw on the urban experience, in particular on the history of Berlin’s development. The rapid production of bricks on a mass-scale in areas around Berlin played a central role in the emergence of the city as a global metropolis in the early 20th century.  Reflecting the artist’s fascination with functional objects in the urban realm, the ceramic forms are derived from historical architectural elements. The manual production gives each element a slightly different shape, and the individual glaze — ranging in shades from light purple to deep cobalt blue and a silvery shimmer — imbues each module with its own nuance. This variation of the object in form and color creates a distinctive vitality. The serial, non-hierarchical arrangement of nearly identical modules in the wall sculptures recalls Donald Judd’s Progressions.

World Time Clock
 

World Time Clock is an ongoing, lifelong photographic project by Bettina Pousttchi. Since 2008 the artist has been traveling to different time zones around the globe to photograph a public clock at the same time: 1:55pm. Over the years, a world-spanning artwork has emerged that maps an “imaginary global synchronism,” connecting cities from Bangkok to Mexiko City, Tashkent to Cape Town. The aspect of traveling becomes a performative gesture shaping this conceptual work about the political and social organization of time and space. At once poetic and political, World Time Clock reveals how systems of timekeeping reflect histories of colonial reach and cultural imitation, addressing questions about time, globalization and transnationality.

“Bettina Pousttchi‘s World Time Clock is a poetic contemplation on global synchronicity and the structuring of time.” 

Melissa Chiu, Director, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.

Private Day
Thursday, May 14
From 11am to 5pm 

Followed by
Henry Street Settlement Gala
from 5pm to 8pm

Public Days
Friday, May 15 until – 
Saturday, May 16
From 11am to 7pm

Sunday, May 17
From 11am to 6pm

INDEPENDENT
Pier 36
299 South Street
New York, 10002