Bettina

Ulrik is pleased to present Non-Waiver, Bettina's second solo exhibition at the gallery. The show consists of two series: photographs made in the 1970s and wooden sculptures realized between 1977–81, variously titled Weapons, The Cutting Edge, Stroke, Non-Waiver, Knife Edge, and Shango. Both series unfold through Bettina’s method of the “random constant.” A sign on the door of her Chelsea Hotel apartment pronounced: “unequal elements constrained and equivocated by a rigid structure of predetermined parameters.”

Emblematic of Bettina’s systematic approach to repetition and variation, the untitled self-portraits apply this framework directly to the image of her own body. They extend her Phenomenological New York series (1972-86), which captured distorted reflections in the city’s glass facades, carrying its investigation into her live–work space. She made the silver gelatin prints in her bathroom, which she turned into a dark room. Bettina often described her apartment as the “Institute for Noumenological Research,” a nod to her sometimes humorous engagement with Kantian philosophy. In these works, the “eclipse of the self” is staged through her fixed-perspective method, while the column-like cropping of the photographs echoes the verticality of New York’s architecture.

Bettina produced the wooden sculptures while living on a liquid diet, noting in her description of this series that she had not eaten solid food for an entire month, due to the rent increase of her woodworking shop. She used only a belt sander to arrive at the permutations of the wave-like motif, recurrent throughout her practice. She describes the volume redistribution in these works in terms of “symmetry and asymmetry in non-waiver balance points.” Working with what she termed “auto-regenerative constants,” each object derives from identical starting elements yet yields different undulating forms through progressive displacement. In the spirit of Duchamp's chance-based treatment of standardized measurements such as his 3 Standard Stoppages, these works reveal Bettina’s conviction that “absolutes are merely constants that are equivocal and mediating and subject to change.”

Together, the two series mark the convergence of X and Y axes, embodying Bettina’s sense of her work as ongoing, “a resolution rather than a conclusion.”

Born in Brooklyn in 1927, Bettina lived and worked at the Chelsea Hotel from the 1970s until her death in 2021, maintaining a prolific conceptual practice that rejected the singular art object. She developed an interconnected body of work spanning photography, xerography, film, video, computer-assisted animation, painting and sculpture. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Ulrik, New York (2024); Césure, Festival d'Automne, Paris (2023); The Hessel Museum, Annandale-on-Hudson (2023); and Les Rencontres d'Arles (2022). Group exhibitions include Kunsthalle Bielefeld (2023), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2023), Greater New York, MoMA PS1, New York (2021), and A Raft, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2021). The monograph Bettina, developed with Yto Barrada and Gregor Huber, was published by Aperture and Atelier EXB in 2022, shortly before the artist's death in November 2021. Two upcoming institutional exhibitions will run concurrently: GTA Zurich (September-November 2025) and The Ruth Foundation for the Arts, Milwaukee (October-March 2025).