BETTINA

Bettina is the first monograph to showcase the work of the previously unsung artist Bettina Grossman, whose wildly interdisciplinary practice spanned photography, sculpture, textile, cinema, drawing, and more.

An eccentric personality fully dedicated to her art, Bettina lived in the famous Chelsea Hotel from 1968 until her death in late 2021. In her tiny studio, she produced and accumulated a considerable body of work, much of which has remained unseen and unpublished until now. Her interests ranged from geometric and abstract studies, drawn from observations of people on the street, to pieces that transformed language into graphic, abstract “verbal forms.” Incorporating strategies of chance and the abstraction of everyday form through repetition and seriality, Bettina pushed the photographic medium to and beyond its limits. As Robert Blackburn, artist and founder of the Printmaking Workshop, astutely observed of Bettina’s work: “The photography, film, sculpture are as one, for the photographic medium is employed not only for documentation but as an endless source of inspiration from which other disciplines emerge—and merge.”

Bettina was the winner of the Luma Rencontres Dummy Book Award Arles 2020 and is copublished by Aperture and Éditions Xavier Barral.

Bettina Grossman (1928–2021; born in New York) preferred to be known as “Bettina.” She spent ten years in Paris during the 1950s before returning to her hometown of New York. In 2020, artist Yto Barrada and the designer Gregor Huber began to produce a book of Bettina’s work, a draft of which won the Luma Rencontres Dummy Book Award Arles 2020. This book was developed in collaboration with Bettina up until her death in November 2021.

Yto Barrada is a multidisciplinary artist with a practice that encompasses photography, film, sculpture, textile, painting, and printmaking. Her many publications and catalogues include A Life Full of Holes: The Strait Project (2005) and Tree Identification for Beginners (2018). In 2006, she founded Cinémathèque de Tanger, the first repertory cinema and archive in Tangier, Morocco.

Ruba Katrib, formerly curator at SculptureCenter, New York, is curator at MoMA PS1 in New York. 

Antonia Pocock is an art scholar and writer, and she teaches art history at the New York City College of Technology. Previously, she held fellowships at the Menil Collection, Houston; Morgan Library and Museum, and Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Gregor Huber runs the award-winning design studio Huber/Sterzinger and the publishing initiative Edition Hors-Sujet with Ivan Sterzinger.