MARC STRAUS is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new painting by Bettina Blohm. This will be the artist’s first show with the gallery.
Bettina Blohm has been refining her abstract paintings for nearly thirty years. Her visual language is inspired by the dense color palettes of Matisse, the scale and breadth of the Abstract Expressionists, and the poetic lack of naturalism of Asian landscape paintings. Each painting is focused on a single color, shifting with brushwork, thickness, hatches and lines to create intermediate spaces. In DOUBLE DUTCH, the ground is a lush blue with interweaving loops of greenish-ochre and small moments of other colors. The title undoubtedly refers to the jump rope game that using two ropes at a time, requires timing and acrobatic facility. In these flat paintings we sense such fluidity, energy, and movement.
Blohm’s works take many months to create. She builds layer upon layer of paint, washes off entire sections, and repaints to create a gestural and urgent surface holding a sense of emotional intensity underneath. She states, “through this process the paintings acquire their own history, like fictional characters. I think of the result as something parallel to nature.”
Blohm studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Germany and moved to New York in 1984, later establishing a second studio in Berlin. She is currently part of a survey exhibition organized by Kunsthalle Bremen and later travelling to Städtische Galerie Bietigheim-Bissingen. She is in numerous international collections, and has exhibited at such prestigious institutions as Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern, Germany; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany; Kurpfälzisches Museum, Heidelberg, Germany, and International Print Center, New York. Blohm lives and works in New York and Berlin.