BETTINA POUSTTCHI

The sculptures belong to the recent series Vertical Highways, which was shown for the first time at the Berlinische Galerie—Museum of Modern Art Berlin.

The artist creates the sculptures from crash barriers, which she mechanically deforms and joins together to form upright works. The individual crash barriers remain recognizable even in their altered forms, and give an idea of the forces that have acted upon them. The anthropomorphic features and the monochrome colours merge the individual parts into a coherent new form. The vertical orientation of the normally horizontally crash barriers changes the usual spatial order and gives the sculptures an architectural reference. In the sequential use of the inceptive object lies a conceptual connection to Minimal Art and also a reference to the Readymades of Marcel Duchamp.