Berlin-based curator and artist Bettina Scholz works across sculpture and a wide range of painting techniques. Inspired by music, sci-fi films, and speculative fiction, Scholz is perhaps best known for her cosmic paintings made with several sheets of layered glass.
Read MoreBettina Scholz was born in 1979 in Neuruppin, Germany, and graduated with an MFA in Fine Arts and Painting from the Weissensee Academy of Art Berlin in 2012. Since 2014, she has lectured at the Berlin University of the Arts alongside her artistic and curatorial practice.
Scholz has been making glass paintings since 2013. The works begin with a single painted surface, on top of which Scholz then layers India ink, acrylic paint, and spray paint between up to three sheets of transparent glass.
Given their materials, texture, and depth, Scholz's glass paintings seem to collapse time and space—at once recalling classical stained-glass windows, digital screens, and microscopic imagery. In works such as O.T. (greenblue 15) (2018), crystalline marks and amorphous clouds of light and colour fill the blue, black, and green pictorial space. Suggesting an impenetrable depth, the work resembles a deep-sea environment or extraterrestrial landscape, .
Scholz has attributed her influences to a kind of synaesthesia, saying, 'when I hear music, I see colours.' In 2019, Scholz's work was featured in HYPER! A Journey into Art and Sound at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg, a group exhibition which explored the relationship between art and music. For the show, Scholz paired glass works with the score from a science-fiction film. Painted while listening to the soundtrack, each work reflects the tone, rhythm, and character of the film and its music. Solaris (2018), for example, is based on Andrei Tarkovsky's Soviet sci-fi film of the same name, and depicts a nebulous constellation of red, yellow, and black. Other soundtracks featured include those from Blade Runner 2049 (2017) and Flash Gordon (1980).
Scholz has also included music as a sound component to accompany several of her exhibitions. For her exhibition Sonic und Vickys Cowboy at Kanya&Kage in Berlin (2019), Scholz included a playlist of songs that had impacted her while she was preparing works for the show.
Scholz has also been engaged in various curatorial projects. In 2016, she co-curated the group show Antenna Futura: Futurological Exercises for the Unknown at the Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna, which explored ways of conceiving humanity's future.
Bettina Scholz's solo exhibitions include Studio Views, SETAREH Gallery (online), 2021; Viele Stimmen, Kanya&Kage, Berlin (2021); Drift, SETAREH Gallery, Düsseldorf (2019); Parallel Realities, Tony Wuethrich Galerie, Basel (2018); Intro Extro New Moon Love Song, Santa Lucia Gallery, Berlin (2018); Die Idee des Pools ist das Weite, Rathausgalerie-Kunsthalle, Munich (2016); and 20 x 15 x 3.5, Galerie M+R Fricke, Berlin (2012).
Group exhibitions include Heaven and Earth in One Stroke, SETAREH, Düsseldorf (2020); Black Album / White Cube, Kunsthal Rotterdam (2020); Alptraum, La Estacion Gallery, Chihuahua, Mexico (2019); Visual Voice Gallery, Montreal (2015); UGM Maribor Art Gallery, Slovenia (2014); and Green Papaya Art Project, Metropolitan Museum of Manila (2012); OneHundredAndOne, Tony Wuethrich Gallery, Basel (2017); Die Geschichte hat einen Fehler, zu viele Erzähler, Kunstverein Gütersloh, Germany (2016); and Objects of my Affection, Galerie M+R Fricke, Berlin (2013).
In 2020, Scholz was nominated for the Lingen Art Award by the Kunsthalle Lingen, Germany.
Bettina Scholz's website can be found here. Her Instagram can be found here.
Alena Kavka | Ocula | 2021
