An exploration of geometry, perception, and self, from a reclusive artist's late-blooming legacy.
Exhibition at Glasgow International
An exhibition titled "Bettina: Finite Structures" at Glasgow International features sculptures, photographs, and films by the artist Bettina Grossman (1927–2021).
The show includes industrially cut marble sculptures and a newly digitized 8mm animation, "Penetration of Four Equal Constants by Eight Elements of Progressive Displacement" (1975–76). This film was created with physicist Robert W Weinberg on a computer-controlled cathode-ray oscilloscope.
Photographic works from the 1970s, such as "Phenomenological New York," show distorted reflections in skyscrapers. A series of self-portraits, "Rencontres Psychic," connects these distortions to the female body.
Background
Born Bettina Grossman in Brooklyn in 1927, she studied commercial art and worked as a textile designer. She traveled to Europe in the late 1950s, studying glass, sculpture, silversmithing, and photography in France, Italy, and Sweden. A fire destroyed her studio and all her work shortly after she returned to New York in 1966.
She then moved into the Chelsea Hotel in 1972, devoting herself to art and becoming reclusive. She died in 2021. Her work gained recognition near the end of her life, including a display at MoMA PS1.
Statements
Artist Yto Barrada, who edited a book about Bettina, described her hotel room as filled with artworks and files. Barrada noted Bettina lived in a "parallel world."