Bettina
Bettina Grossman (b. September 28,1927–d. November 4, 2021), was an American conceptual artist and autodidact working across genres of photography, film, sculpture, painting, printmaking, bookmaking, textile, text, and commercial design. Born in the Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, to Orthodox Jewish parents, Bettina studied commercial art in high school and soon obtained a job designing neckties, sheets, and domestic textiles for a New York-based firm. After saving enough money, Bettina moved to Europe in 1957 to pursue a career and life in art. Over the next decade, she studied stained glass techniques in France, visited Carrara, Italy to select marble for her sculptures, and worked with the textile retailers Liberty of London and William Morris Society in London to produce commercial fabric patterns. It was during these years that she eventually dropped her full name, preferring to go by the mononym “Bettina.”
She returned to New York in 1965 and set up a studio in Brooklyn Heights until a fire in December 1966 destroyed her entire oeuvre—a traumatic event that haunted her the rest of her life and pushed her to return to Europe in 1970 to rebuild artistically and spiritually. For the next two years, she traveled across France, Italy, and Turkey, continuing her research and experimentation in decorative and craft traditions—a period that fostered several new collaborations between Bettina and European ateliers, including with the esteemed rug weaving manufactory Atelier Pinton in Aubusson, France, the stained glass manufactory Ateliers Loires in Chartres, France, and Sundour Fabrics in Carlisle, England.
Around 1972, Bettina moved into Room 503 in the Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues, where she remained for the next fifty years, transforming her apartment (which she called “The Institute for Noumenological Research” after Immanuel Kant) into a studio supportive of her expansive, ecosystemic practice. In the wake of the fire, her first works took the form of eggs, “being the source of everything.” Bettina evolved her works serially, relationally. Working in close dialogue with many of the most significant styles and schools of 1960s and 70s American art including pop, op-art, minimalism, and conceptual art and distressed at the loss of her archive, Bettina drew from non-Euclidean geometry, philosophical theories of accumulation, and technologies of reproducibility to develop a rigorous practice of documentation and self-indexical exploration.
While she presented her work publicly across the 1970s and early 80s, including an important solo exhibition at Pop Art impresario Ivan Karp’s O.K. Harris Gallery in 1980, she was attuned to and frustrated by the many obstacles and limitations for women artists in the commercial and fine art worlds she straddled, and so, preferred to work alone. Her social isolation allowed her to live and pursue her work on her own terms and prompted the origination of some of her most important bodies of work, including the series The Fifth Point of the Compass/New York A to Z, Studies in Random Constant, and Fixed Focus Time-Lapse, which consists of thousands of birds-eye view photographs of New Yorkers navigating their daily lives, all of them shot by Bettina from the balcony of her fifth-floor apartment, and later organized into various families (red, rain, readers, bicycles), providing structure to the chaos of urban life and her own observations.
Bettina’s encounters with younger artists in the last decade of her life brought her work into new visibility and contexts as the fate of the Chelsea Hotel and its rent-controlled apartments became evermore precarious. This included important friendships with the Dutch filmmaker Corrine van der Borch, who collaborated with Bettina on the documentary film, The Girl With the Black Balloons (2010), and her introduction to the Moroccan-French artist Yto Barrada in 2015, who now serves as the director of her estate and collaborated with her on exhibitions and print publications across the last years of her life.
Prior to Original Order Order Original: The Art and Archives of Bettina, Rivers Institute in collaboration with the Ruth Foundation for the Arts, Milwaukee (2025), recent solo presentations of Bettina’s work include: Bettina: NEW YORK: 1965-86 at Ulrik Gallery, New York (2024), Yto Barrada/Balcon Bettina at the Festival d’Automne, Paris (2023); Bettina: The Fifth Point of the Compass at The Hessel Museum at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson (2023); and A poem of perpetual renewal, Les Recontres d’Arles (2022). Recent group exhibitions include Kunsthalle Bielefeld (2023), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2023), Greater New York, MoMA PS1, New York (2021), and A Raft at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2021). Part one of Bettina’s first monograph, BETTINA, was copublished by Aperture and Éditions Xavier Barral in 2022 and represents the last collaboration between artist Yto Barrada, designer Gregor Huber, and Bettina before her death in November 2021. The second part of the publication will follow in 2026.
