Bettina Carl
Bettina Carl is a Swiss-German artist, based in Zurich, educated in Berlin, born in Bavaria in 1968.
Her recent solo and group exhibitions include shows at DuflonRacz Brussels, Laura Mars Gallery Berlin, DuflonRacz Bern, Kunsthaus Grenchen, MARCO Museum of Contemporary Art Buenos Aires, Haus am Luetzowplatz Berlin, Helmhaus Zurich, D.U.M. Museum for Contemporary Art Brno, CZ, and Lucie Fontaine, Milan.
She won several residencies and awards in Berlin and Zurich, among them are the Berlin Senate's Arbeitsstipendium, the City of Zurich's residency stipend in Buenos Aires, and various project grants by German institutions and Swiss foundations. Bettina Carl is also active as a curator, writer and translator in the art field.
From 2008 until 2013, Bettina Carl was represented by Vegas Gallery London, and Christiane Buentgen's SchauOrt Zurich. Since 2014, DuflonRacz Bern / Brussels are representing her work.
Bettina Carl’s artistic practice focuses on drawing. While her multi-layered compositions evade a narrative approach, often verging on abstraction, her work remains figurative. For the past couple of years, corporeality has been the predominant issue of her work, more precisely the unresolved, and often rather silly relations we are doomed to maintain to our physical selves.
Inspite of their simple materiality, Bettina Carl's drawings reveal an exuberant fascination with the sensual possibilities of her medium. Carl's imagery draws on many sources, ranging from electro punk music, renaissance painting, to queer studies, bad design and the mundane beauty of trees and ageing bodies- to mention only a few. Writers like Virginia Wolf, David Foster Wallace or Roberto Bolaño have also been highly influential for her. While works on paper are at the heart of Bettina Carls's practice, the artist has also been acknowledged for her installations, combining drawings with found objects, verbal quotes, and texts of her own.
"(…) The colourful, sometimes “light-handed” drawings can be read as commentaries: on concepts of the body and the emotionality of physicality, on ideas of the animal as something uncontrollable that eludes rational access. Bettina Carl pursues these themes with great consistency. Moreover, her interest in ever new approaches and perspectives is impressive, turning each group of works into a concise, individual investigation of content and means of expression.”
(excerpt from a text by art historian Irene Müller, published in 'Kunstbulletin', October 2020, introducing Bettina Carl's solo show "Take A Bone From a Dog", at DuflonRacz Brussels - Click here for full article)
Exhibitions at DuflonRacz - click on title for link to the show:
Solo:
Take a Bone from a Dog, Brussels, 2020
Anti-Falten, 2017
Nahe Verwandte des Menschen, 2014
Group:
LIME, with Etel Adnan, Bettina Carl, Christian Gonzenbach & Inga Häusermann, Bern, 2020
Feux Follets, with Esther Altorfer, Annette Barcelo, Bettina Carl, Marc Elsener, Kathrin Racz, Lionel Sabatté, Karoline Schreiber, Matthias Wyss
Website: www.bettinacarl.com