Just back from the marble quarries of Carrara … Bettina in the 2022 documentary Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel. Photograph: TCD/Prod.DB/Alamy View image in fullscreen Just back from the marble quarries of Carrara … Bettina in the 2022 documentary Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel. Photograph: TCD/Prod.DB/Alamy Art and design ‘She slept in the hallway on a lawn chair’: how Bettina’s astonishing art outgrew her Chelsea Hotel room The reclusive figure spent decades filling every surface of her apartment at the legendary New York hotel with artworks that rose in teetering piles. Some are now on display for the first time in Glasgow
Prefer the Guardian on Google W hen the artist Yto Barrada stepped through the door of room 503, up on the fifth floor of New York’s Chelsea Hotel , she was overwhelmed by what she saw. Every inch of the walls was plastered with Xeroxed word art, graphic reproductions of geometric sculptures, hundreds of photographs of passersby in the street below and collections of leaves laid out in grids. Piles of cardboard boxes and crates, full of yet more artworks, prints, books and maquettes, created teetering canyons through which Barrada had to turn sideways to navigate. Every visible surface was covered with sculptural forms in brass, marble and wood. In the midst of it all, on a small daybed surrounded by this aggregation of 40 years of fervent work, was Bettina, as the resident artist of the famous New York landmark was simply known.
“One sees Bettina and understands that some disaster has taken place, long ago,” writes Barrada in Bettina, the book she edited with the designer Gregor Huber, published by Aperture in 2022. Barrada was one of only a handful of people the reclusive artist had permitted to enter 503 since she moved into the Chelsea in 1972. Despite the bohemian buzz around the hotel, with neighbours including Patti Smith, Bob Dylan and many of Andy Warhol’s entourage, Bettina chose to lock herself away, devoting her life to conceptual works that seemed to flow unstoppably from deep within, a creative impulse she likened to a divine energy.
View image in fullscreen ‘Fervent work’ … Bettina with some of her art in a Chelsea Hotel corridor, 2011. Photograph: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images As the artworks accumulated, Bettina became increasingly estranged from her family and friends, and progressively suspicious of outside interest. For years, when she had to leave the hotel for groceries, she would take her latest works and portfolios with her in a shopping trolley, fearing burglary. She slept in her hallway on a lawn chair, as her prolific output eventually colonised every room in the apartment. In 2015, when Barrada got to know Bettina and eventually came to visit her, she thought Bettina lived in a parallel world entirely of her own making.
Sculpture, photographs and films by the artist have just gone on show in an exhibition called Bettina: Finite Structures, part of Glasgow International festival of contemporary art . Alongside industrially cut marble sculptures, a newly digitised 8mm animation is on view for the first time. Titled Penetration of Four Equal Constants by Eight Elements of Progressive Displacement (1975-76), it was made with the assistance of physicist Robert W Weinberg and was programmed on a computer-controlled cathode-ray oscilloscope. Photographic works, also from the 1970s, and developed and printed in Bettina’s bathroom, include Phenomenological New York, which depicts distorted reflections in the glass and steel skyscrapers that had come to typify the architecture of finance capitalism on Wall Street. A series of self-portraits from the same era, titled Rencontres Psychic, draws connections between those wavering, wobbly distortions and the contours of the female body.
The creator of all these works was born Bettina Grossman into an Orthodox Jewish family in Brooklyn in 1927 and, growing up, was known as Betty. She studied commercial art in high school, and was soon supporting herself as a textile designer and stylist. In the late 1950s, aged 30, she travelled to Paris, intending to spend a year exploring Europe. She would go on to spend the next eight years traversing the continent, maintaining her textiles work while collecting a host of new skills in glass, sculpture, silversmithing and photography. She explored the marble quarries of Carrara, designed silverware in Stockholm and was instructed in the production of stained glass by master artisans in Chartres, France. During this period, she shrugged off her erstwhile nickname and became known as Bettina.
View image in fullscreen Distorted reflections … Phenomenological New York. Photograph: Bettina Photo: Stephen Faught She returned to New York in 1966 and moved into a live-work studio in Brooklyn Heights. Still known primarily as a commercial designer, Bettina began to see the parallels between the types of work she had been developing in Europe and the systemic painting a…