The best exhibition in New York consists of 50-year-old works that have hardly ever been seen by anyone: sculpture and photography by the mysterious, and glamorously mononymous, Bettina. “New York: 1965–86,†now on view at the Canal Street gallery Ulrik, is the first solo presentation of the late artist’s work in this city since 1980. It’s a concise and modest selection from an artist whose estate was very nearly lost to oblivion; parts of this archive were thrown into, then rescued from, the trash.
The gallery walls are hung with selections from her photography series “Phenomenological New York†(1970s–1980s), which takes the city as subject. Five small black-and-white prints offer varying interpretations of constellated lines, warped streetscapes, and architectural surfaces. In a few larger works, photographs are patterned into a grid, each image showing taxicabs, figures, sidewalks, and buildings touched by striated light. Rendered in a soft palette of browns and yellows, they’re reminiscent of the establishing montages of ’70s and ’80s movies, where crowds of commuters navigate traffic and public space. The artist’s compulsion to repeat, expand, and exhaust comes across in her sculptural work, too, such as in “One Constant. Euclidean to Non-Euclidean Curve†(1972–73), where circles of wooden slats curl into the shapes of conches or waves.
But who was Bettina? A lifelong New Yorker — one difficult to insert into the city’s known histories of art. Born Bettina Grossman in Brooklyn in 1927, she lived in the Chelsea Hotel until her death in 2021 in proximity to celebrated artists and intellectuals. Her work dealt in the visual languages of her contemporaries: Op Art, conceptualism, minimalism. And yet it’s not clear she had meaningful relationships with any of the better-known artists around her. Alex Fleming, who co-owns Ulrik with Anya Komar, says Bettina was “surrounded by these people and still never in dialogue with or a part of these scenes that were threaded through the space that she lived in for 50 years.â€
What we do know is that in her 20s she undertook a career in textile design which would take her to Europe. She returned to New York in 1966, setting up an art studio in Brooklyn Heights that was then destroyed in a fire. Every existing history of her life places the studio fire at its psychic center. It destroyed the entire archive of her work from the first four decades of her life. It killed her cat. Had she been home, she said, she would have been killed. Following the fire, she undertook to reproduce her lost artworks, sometimes using materials such as marble. A small selection of these works are on view at Ulrik: cubic objects rendered in graphic black-and-white stone. The fire seemed to provoke what Fleming calls “a state of hyperproduction,†alongside “rigorous and methodical†documentation — as Fleming puts it, “She was vigilant about keeping her practice alive.â€
She moved into the Chelsea in 1972, setting up in an apartment that she called “The Institute for Noumenological Research†(after Kant). She worked prodigiously and in private, such that over the five decades of her residence, she was known to sleep on a chair in the hallway, her apartment being too full of artwork that she rarely allowed others to see. Her isolation allowed her to live and produce work on her own terms; an acquaintance remembered Bettina telling her, “I’m eating an onion, and a slice of bread, and it tastes good because I’m hungry.â€
What else transpired over her life is in the process of being recovered, chiefly by the artist Yto Barrada, the director of her estate, and by curator Marina Caron. Barrada met Bettina in 2015, as the latter was nearing 90, after watching a documentary about her by filmmaker Corinne van der Borch. She became a dedicated advocate for and caretaker of her work, inviting Bettina to exhibit alongside her in a two-person show in 2019. She and Caron, who was then Barrada’s studio manager, began working with Bettina on a comprehensive inventory of her work, unpacking and cataloguing stores of boxes from her apartment. Barrada also produced the first monograph of Bettina’s work, published by Aperture shortly after Bettina’s 2021 death, and on January 20, she’ll perform at Ulrik in conjunction with the gallery show.
Bettina’s ambition, like her artworks themselves, was pure and mathematical: It exceeded recognition. Her ambition was completion. Her only duty as an artist was to herself. “When a person is given this reward of seeing something changing before their eyes and being able to capture it and make it concrete so that others may understand also, then this is a responsibility,†she said in an interview. “And you are giving up your food, your necessities, for something like that, because it becomes an overpowering commitment. And you must pursue it!â€