The exhibition “Variations on Subject and Object” presents recent works by Bettina Pousttchi and Clare Woods.

The new red sculpture by Bettina Pousttchi from the “Vertical Highways” series is made from guardrails, which the artist has transformed and arranged into a vertical composition.

For several years, Pousttchi has incorporated objects into her sculptures that structure the physical experience of urban space. By bending, pressing, and altering their color, she relieves these everyday objects of their regulatory function and detaches them from their original context of meaning. They become 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 to Marcel Duchamp’s readymades. Through her intervention in form, she creates a variation of a prefabricated element into a new, autonomous object.

In relation to the red-lacquered sculpture, handcrafted ceramics are presented. Their cubic 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 burgundy red and light purple to deep cobalt blue—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.

Working in variations is also a central approach in Clare Woods’s practice and is evident in her small-format oil paintings on aluminum—such as the four versions of a trifle, the British layered dessert, created in the same year.

Woods’s painting moves between abstract gesture and enigmatic figuration. As the artist herself puts it: “The image is the starting point but it’s not necessarily about the image ever.” Rather, through her brushwork and a wet-on-wet technique in oil painting—which requires completing the work in a single session after careful preparation—Clare Woods condenses the motif into a high painterly intensity within a small space.

Her still lifes may depict motifs—flower bouquets, cupcakes, or trifle—but ultimately, thanks to the characteristic reduction of still-life narrative, it is color that lends the paintings their intensity and creates a vitality that follows an inner sensation more than an external representation.

About the artists:

Recently, Bettina Pousttchi’s monumental sculpture Vertical Highways V03 was on view in front of Rockefeller Center in New York City. On May 1, the exhibition Interactions 2026 opens at the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, where works from the artist’s World Time Clock series will be presented in the large entrance hall.

Clare Woods will open the solo exhibition Garden without Seasons at Pitzhanger Manor in London on July 29.