Bettina Pousttchi – Double Monuments at The Phillips Collection, Washington DC, USA
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This summer, The Phillips Collection presents the work of German artist Bettina Pousttchi, which explores the history and memory of architecture. Double Monuments is part of the Phillips’s ongoing Intersections series that highlights contemporary art and artists in conversation with the museum’s permanent collection, history, and architecture.
Through photography and sculpture, Berlin-based artist Bettina Pousttchi explores the history and memory of architecture. In her series Double Monument for Flavin and Tatlin (2010–2014), Pousttchi incorporates constraining materials like rails, street barricades, and metal crowd barriers into sculptural forms with spiraling vertical towers and neon light tubes. These “double monuments” reference the work of Russian constructivist sculptor-architect Vladimir Tatlin from the 1920s and American minimalist artist Dan Flavin from the 1960s, created in homage to Tatlin.
Five Double Monument sculptures, ranging from 8 to 12 feet, are on view, dramatically illuminating the space with their neon lights. The sculptures are paired with Naum Gabo’s Linear Structure in Space No. 1 (1943) and photographs from the 1930s and 1940s by Berenice Abbott, Louis Faurer, Alfred Eisenstaedt, and Gjon Mili, black-and-white images that underline the theme of illuminated space presented in Pousttchi’s work.
For more information please visit the website of The Phillips Collection.