Bettina
Expression Repression Digression Supression Depression Oppression Regression Aggression
24 September – 7 November 2025
gta exhibitions, Foyer, ETH Zurich, Hönggerberg
Opening: 23 September, 6 pm
The long exhibition title, borrowed from a print by Bettina Grossman (1927 – 2021), creates ambivalence as the terms accumulate, for the words are variously related – semantically, on one hand, and through rhythm and repetition, on the other. It dates back to 1969 and is a response to police brutalities the artist witnessed in Paris after 1968. By introducing artistic strategies of this kind, Bettina succeeds in both energizing and dissolving representational systems. Words become pictures. This artwork in comparison with her photographed flags or street views reveals a vocabulary situated within characteristic registers of modernist ambitions. The word works, the subversion of figure and ground in her compositions and the incorporation of applied arts may well seem to serve this entrenched lineage of art and architecture history. Similarly, her expansion of the artwork into architectural space recalls the tropes of the 1970s, exemplified in Germano Celant’s programmatic survey of European and US art discourse in his 1976 Venice Biennale, Ambiente/Arte. The juxtaposition of reconstructed historical installations from the 1920s with contemporary works positioned Conceptual artists such as Michael Asher, Dan Graham, and Daniel Buren within the artistic trajectory launched by figures like El Lissitzky and Giacomo Balla. Bettina worked similarly in a conceptual practice that observed the behaviour of passersby and the community atmosphere in her neighbourhood and the city. At the same time, one feels uneasy about reducing Bettina’s oeuvre to her biography and twists of fate within a straightforward genealogy, or—worse still—comparing her to the legacy of Swiss concrete art. Moreover, mystery and loss complicate the reading. In 1966, her studio caught fire and decades of her work disappeared, mostly designs for textiles, silver and mosaics. She had to start all over again, and from that point on, her work was rarely shown to a wider public. As of 1972, she lived in the Chelsea Hotel in New York, where she meticulously stored what she produced in her dense archive on industrial shelves. Like many of her female contemporaries, she remained largely unrecognized throughout her decades of creative output. In 2015, when Bettina was almost 90 years old, New York based artist Yto Barrada saw a film about her, made by Corinne van der Borch. Captivated, Barrada reached out to Bettina. A friendship ensued, and together they began to unpack and organize Bettina’s work, which entirely filled room 503 of the Chelsea Hotel. With Barrada’s guidance, the busy following years saw Bettina’s first shows staged, the two artists exhibited together and Barrada edited and arranged the publication of the monograph, BETTINA, with Swiss designer Gregor Huber. Before Bettina died in 2021, at the age of 94, she assigned Barrada the responsibility of managing her estate. Under pressure from the hotel’s new owners to vacate the small apartment, Barrada’s team saved works from the dumpster, and the younger artist went on to legally acquire the Estate of Bettina Grossman.
The show at gta exhibitions, ETH Zurich is a collaborative production with the Estate of Bettina Grossman, the artist Yto Barrada, the gallerists of Ulrik, Anya Komar and Alex Fleming in New York, and is invigorated by their perspective on the late artist‘s work. A selection of works from different series and periods introduces Bettina’s practice in the context of an architecture school. A mural, realized for the first time, wraps around the entire exhibition space. It shows a sequence of photographs of the United States flag swaying in the wind, or rather its distorted reflection in the glass façade of a Manhattan high-rise building. A group of marble sculptures, entitled Inside-Outside House, date back to Bettina’s re-start after her studio was destroyed by fire in the mid-1960s. In the scale of an architecture model, they are arranged in a serial grid, while the material, precious marble, flies in the face of then-current Minimalism, which favoured industrial materials. A selection of works from her Phenomenological New York series is paired with an early abstract tapestry. Although serial grids and abstraction, as applied to art and architecture, play a role, they are undermined through distortion. Just as the American Flag dissolves in Bettina’s mural, the works on display oppose the sentiment of systematic representational orders: Expression Repression Digression Supression Depression Oppression Regression Aggression.
Biography
Born in 1927 in New York, Bettina Grossman received a scholarship to the Parsons School of Design but instead decided to pursue a career in fabric design. After working for a textile company in New York, she spent several years in Europe (1957–1965), where she designed fabric in Paris and London, silverware in Stockholm and mosaic floors in Italy. During this time, she also worked as a colour coordinator for Knoll Associates and developed colour combinations for the William Morris Society collection. She began working in photography by the mid-1960s, and some of her colour photographs were featured in an issue of Camera 35 magazine in 1965. Returning to New York in 1966, she opened a studio in Brooklyn Heights and began signing her work as Bettina or Bettina/Bashyi. After a devastating fire in her Brooklyn Heights studio in December 1966, which destroyed her work and killed her cat, she returned to Europe and travelled to Italy, thanks to an award she received in 1970. Back in New York again around 1972, she moved into the Chelsea Hotel, where she remained a long-time resident. She died in New York in November 2021 at the age of 94.
Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Ulrik, New York (2024); Césure, Festival d’Automne, Paris (2023); the Hessel Museum, Annandale-on-Hudson (2023); and Les Rencontres d’Arles (2022). Recent group exhibitions include Galerie Oskar Weiss, Zurich (2025); Kunsthalle Bielefeld (2023); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2023); Greater New York, MoMA PS1, New York (2021); and A RAFT, the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2021). Upcoming solo exhibition: The Ruth Foundation for the Arts, Milwaukee (October 2025).
This exhibition is indebted to the Artist-in-Residence Program made possible by the Thomas and Doris Ammann Foundation.
The exhibition would not be possible without the efforts of the team of gta exhibitions, Elena Bally, Melinda Bieri, Flora Bühlmann, Mina Hava, Ben Frei, Ella Mathys, Ivana Milenković, Lauro Nächt, Till Kadler, Margaux Koch Goei, Sabine Sarwa, Lucas Lenzin, Julian Volken, Vitus Michel, Eva Tschopp, and Philipp Stäheli.
