The Buchmann Galerie is pleased to announce the exhibition Horizons by Bettina Pousttchi. The presentation brings together new photographic works on canvas from the eponymous series Horizons, as well as new polychrome sculptures made of ceramic and steel. The point of departure for all three groups of works is, in different ways, the urban experience of Berlin.

Coinciding with the exhibition at the gallery is the inauguration of the six-meter-high sculpture Vertical Highways V02 by Bettina Pousttchi in front of the Istanbul Modern as part of the museum collection.

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 luminous mint green, 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 Horizons series alludes to the artist’s highly acclaimed photo installation Echo, which covered the entire façade of the Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin with 970 photographic prints on paper for six months in 2009/2010. Applied as a seamless motif around the façade, the prints created a three-dimensional photomontage that evoked the Palast der Republik, a building which had been demolished shortly before on the same site.

For the Horizons series, 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 works thus form a layered depiction of past time and the physical traces it leaves in our environment. They function both as trace of the real and as containers of temporality and memory.

Reflecting on the work, Ela Bittencourt wrote in frieze magazine: “By further removing any direct relationship to the original archival images, Pousttchi expresses a healthy scepticism towards photography’s ability to reliably author the past.” (1)

The Horizons underscore the artist’s interest in questions of photography’s materiality and indexicality today and are also emblematic of ongoing processes of urban change in Berlin.

Forming a dialogue with the works on canvas are new, colourfully glazed ceramic sculptures. These works also draw on the urban experience of Berlin, in particular on the specific history of the city’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 latest works in the sculptural series Vertical Highways are created from transformed guardrails, another element of urban space. The vertical orientation of the street objects, which are typically used horizontally, alters their familiar spatial configuration, endowing the works with new meaning detached from their original regulatory function. Rather, the sculptures emerge as markers of change, fluid structures, and dissolving boundaries.

Bettina Pousttchi was born in Mainz in 1971 and lives in Berlin. She studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and completed the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York. Her work has been exhibited extensively at international art institutions. In recent years, she has had solo exhibitions at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Shanghai, the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, and the Museum Haus Konstruktiv in Zurich, where a catalogue is forthcoming at year’s end. Previous solo exhibitions have been held at the Berlinische Galerie in Berlin, the Arts Club of Chicago, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., the Philips Collection in Washington D.C, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, and the Kunsthalle Basel.

In December, the Buchmann Galerie will present Bettina Pousttchi’s extensive photographic series World Time Clock at Art Basel Miami Beach. The series has previously been shown in solo exhibitions of the artist’s work at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., the Berlinische Galerie, and the Aurora Museum in Shanghai.
 

(1) Ela Bittencourt, “Bettina Pousttchi Deep Dives into Urban Ideologies and Collective Memory,” Frieze Magazine, Issue 243