Bettina Pousttchi

Bettina Pousttchi (born 1971) is a German artist. She currently lives in Berlin. She has worked in photography, sculpture, video and site-specific installation.

Life

In 1990-1992, she studied fine art at the Université de Paris. Then in 1992-1997, studied philosophy, art history and film theory at the Universities of Cologne and Bochum. She studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Rosemarie Trockel and in 1995-1999. From 1999-2000, she followed the Independent Studio Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. She had work in the Venice Biennale in 2003 and again in 2009. In 2014, she received the Kunstpreis der Stadt Wolfsburg of the , in Wolfsburg in Lower Saxony.

Work

In 2016–2017 her photographic series ''World Time Clock'' was shown at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; it consisted of twenty-four photographs of clock-faces, one from each of the major time zones of the world, and all taken at five minutes to two.

Façades in public space

Since 2009, Bettina Pousttchi has been realizing photographic interventions on public buildings, which are related to the urban and historic context of each particular place. Her monumental photo installation ''Echo'' on Schlossplatz in Berlin covered the entire exterior façade of the Temporäre Kunsthalle for half a year. Extending nearly 2,000 square meters, the installation consisted of 970 different paper posters, and formed a continuous motif that recalled the Palast der Republik ( Palace of the Republic), the building which had just been demolished on that very site.

In 2014, the artist transformed the Nasher Sculpture Center Dallas into a Drive-Thru Museum, referencing the site's history and the architecture of the Renzo Piano building. Her up to now largest photo installation to this point is ''The City'' (2014), which covered three sides of the Wolfsburg castle with a 2,150 square meter photographic print. The photomontage shows ten skyscrapers that have been the world's highest buildings, grouping them together into an imaginary single transnational skyline.

On the occasion of her survey exhibition ''In Recent Years'' 2019-2020 at Berlinische Galerie, she transformed the entire glass facade of the museum with the photo installation ''Berlin Window''.

Konzerthaus Berlin commissioned the artist 2021 on the occasion of their bicentennial with the work, ''Amplifier'' transforming the historical building by Karl Friedrich Schinkel on Gendarmenmarkt.

Sculptures

Pousttchi’s sculptural works often use street furniture like street bollards, crowd barriers or bike racks as a starting point. She transforms these everyday objects into new sculptural compositions of various colors and surfaces. Her most recent sculptures ''Vertical Highways'' are transformations of crash barriers. The vertical alignment and modular use of a prefabricated element change the viewer’s spatial perception and give the work an architectural reference. Three of these sculptures were presented at the Tuileries Garden in Paris in October 2021, as part of the outdoor exhibition ''Hors les Murs'' in front of the Musée du Louvre.

Collections

Examples of her work are held in various public collections, among them the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., the Arts Club of Chicago, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas, the Berlinische Galerie in Berlin, the Albertina in Vienna, the Von-der-Heydt Museum in Wuppertal, the Kunsthalle Bielefeld

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