Bettina Pousttchi: Fluidity

Bettina Pousttchi’s survey exhibition at the Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck presents sculptures, reliefs, ceramics, video and photographs developed over the last 20 years. Additionally, Pousttchi’s sculpture Marianne (2015) has been installed permanently as the final piece in the museum’s Skulpturenufer (Riverside sculpture park) in Remagen. This permanent outdoor sculpture park along the banks of the Rhine River, which has evolved over the last two decades, presents 14 sculptures in a splendid setting. What began with Hans Arp’s Bewegtes Tanzgeschmeide in front of the museum now concludes with Bettina Pousttchi’s Marianne.

The central spaces of the exhibition in the modern Richard Meier building feature recent sculptures made out of street objects, such as tree-protection barriers, street bollards and crash barriers. In her Vertical Highways and Squeezers series, the artist mechanically deforms these familiar objects, arranges them into new sculptural forms and coats them with paint. Transformed in this way, the industrially manufactured elements abandon their original purpose of establishing order in public space, taking on new forms that communicate and interact with each other.

These works are complemented by the recently created series Directions, wall reliefs made out of cut and color-coated steel which are mounted “floating” on the wall. Roads with markings also determine the Drive Thru photo series. The black-and-white photographs are based on the installation Drive Thru Museum (Nasher Sculpture Center Dallas, 2014) in which the artist presented her own work in dialogue with the museum’s collection in an unusual way, including the sculpture Torso with Buds by Hans Arp.

Bettina Pousttchi was born in Mainz in 1971 and lives in Berlin. She studied at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and graduated from the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York. She stands as one of Germany’s foremost contemporary artists and has also received significant recognition internationally, especially in the United States, where solo exhibitions of her work have been held in institutions such as the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Phillips Collection in Washington DC, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and the Arts Club of Chicago. A recent survey exhibition of her work was organized by the Berlinische Galerie Berlin, following solo presentations at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and the Kunsthalle Basel. This summer, the artist will realize a large-scale, site-specific rooftop installation commissioned by the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn.