Yto Barrada Balcon Bettina

The first presentation in Paris of the work of Bettina (1927-2021, born Bettina Grossman), this exhibition bears witness to Yto Barrada's admiration for the hypnotic, self-taught practice of this rare artist, an 'eccentric' figure in the New York of the 1970s and 1980s. Since their meeting in 2015, she has devoted herself to the recognition and archiving of her polymorphous work, which was barely visible until the late 2010s, apart from an exhibition at the famous OK Harris Gallery (New York) in 1980. In 2022, in collaboration with Gregor Huber, Yto Barrada published the first monograph on Bettina (Atelier EXB) for the Rencontres de la photographie d'Arles.

Bettina has lived in the Chelsea Hotel since 1972, after her New York studio burnt down in 1966, destroying all her work - particularly that of her European years - and she has developed a singular and prolific body of work, hidden from view, consisting of processual photographic series, conceptual sculptures and films, drawings and textual scores. "The only way to make such beautiful things is to cut yourself off from reality, from your friends, from the messy present. When you isolate yourself, you allow divine energy to circulate", she asserted. Her work is powerfully visual, at once rigorous and geometric, transcendental and poetic, and in direct contact with the avant-gardes of the twentieth century. In one of her main bodies of work, entitled The Fifth Point of the Compass/New York From A to Z, Studies in Random Constant, Fixed Focus-Time Lapse (1977-1985), she photographed passers-by from the balcony of her room on the fifth floor of the Chelsea Hotel, then organised the thousands of shots according to various categories (red, rain, bicycles, readers, etc.), giving shape to a fascinating urban grammar.

The exhibition presents a representative range of the artist's many practices - film, photography, sculpture, works on paper, scotch tape paintings, collections of words - as well as stained glass windows and a tapestry made in the early 1970s, recently rediscovered and shown here for the first time. Born and raised in New York, Bettina first lived in Europe between 1957 and 1965, where she worked with Knoll Associates, Liberty and the William Morris Society, and then again in 1970-1972, when she worked with the Loire (stained glass) and Pinton (tapestry) studios. When she lived in Paris, Bettina lived on boulevard Raspail, not far from the Immanence art centre.