Bettina Pousttchi: Progressions

Museum Haus Konstruktiv is opening the new exhibition year with a solo show on Bettina Pousttchi (b. 1971 in Mainz, Germany). Sculptures, photographic works and wall-mounted objects are on display. The exhibition provides deep insight into the multi-layered oeuvre of this artist, who is well-known for her monumental site-specific facade installations in public spaces. The majority of the presented works were specially created for the exhibition. In various formal arrangements, they emphasize the processual and the fluid, while reflecting on social change.

With her sculptures, which she develops for indoor and outdoor spaces, Bettina Pousttchi makes reference to the architectural, social and cultural implications of their respective settings. For several years now, she has been using objects that structure the public space and characterize the physical experience of the urban space, including crash barriers, crowd barriers, bicycle racks and tree protection barriers. By applying techniques such as bending or pressing, and reconceiving their coloring, Pousttchi relieves these everyday objects of their regulatory function and detaches them from their context of meaning, turning them into signs of change, fluid structures and dissolving boundaries. With her serial use of the source material, the artist conceptually draws on minimal art, and some of her objects can also remind the observer of Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades.

The main focus of the Haus Konstruktiv exhibition is on Pousttchi’s sculptures: artworks made using steel, ceramics and light. These are complemented by new photographic works, which also play a key role in this internationally renowned artist’s multifaceted oeuvre.