, 2010)
Bettina Buck is a German artist whose work profoundly disorientates the viewer by redefining the relationship between artworks and the spaces they are exhibited in. She presents pieces that seem curiously disparate or out of place, and regularly
Bettina Buck is a German artist whose work profoundly disorientates the viewer by redefining the relationship between artworks and the spaces they are exhibited in. She presents pieces that seem curiously disparate or out of place, and regularly reclaims mundane industrial or industrially produced objects. The subsequent transformation of these materials and objects questions notions of perception, and re-interprets accepted sculptural techniques. For her “statements booth” at Art Basel 41, Buck has transformed the space itself into an artwork – one that almost seeks to hide the works contained therein.
Bettina Buck: I’m interested in what I find around me and I like to add something that creates a tremor, a vibration and a conversation with its surroundings. I would like the viewer to experience the Statements Booth at Basel as a deliberate intervention in the art fair – one that flips between being a functioning booth and a piece of work that is understated, nearly hidden yet extremely present at the same time. The bronze Swellings included in the intervention are each produced out of one canister of expanding foam. I perform with the qualities and force this material brings and seek to convey that energy into the rigid material of bronze with all its art historical, conceptual and physical qualities. Hunting-Scene – Dusk is a rolled up and wrapped silk-motif carpet, hovering above the ground. It communicates with certain conceptual and visual aspects of the booth intervention as well as the imaginative possibilities evoked by the title. This work also has a personal narrative, the carpet being bought some 20 years ago by my father before he died (I’ve not seen it unrolled for over 15 years). It’s important for me that the work and the specific situation involves or includes the viewer using a disrupted logic or dialect that doesn’t sit too comfortably: I want it to have something familiar and alienating at the same time. Provoking an anarchical glimmer of something is crucial in challenging the imagination.
