In our current exhibition of Bettina Krieg’s work, we are showing a group of new, mostly large-format drawings created over the past two years. Bettina’s line drawings evoke many associations. One can think of extremely enlarged hair bundles or waves. In any case, they are about movement and rhythm.

From a technical point of view, the sheets, up to 2 meters in size, are particularly astonishing when one realizes that the artist draws exclusively freehand. She does not use stencils, but places line after line in a meditative process and lets the wave structures grow associatively over long periods of time. Julia Voss compares the structures in the text to the catalogue “Stream” with sound waves, and this comparison is probably very apt, because Bettina says that a picture is finished when it “sounds right” to her.

During the Lockdown Phases 2020 Bettina Krieg made a series of small ink drawings which she called Lockdown Diaries. During the long period of isolation in the studio, she was extremely productive and made a small drawing every day. A very beautiful catalogue has also been produced to accompany this.

In addition, she has published a comprehensive catalogue of her work and this year has developed a whole new body of work of large drawings in which she uses multiple colors within one work, something she has never done before. She now places the colors, which she always used only monochrome on one sheet in earlier works, next to each other, creating their own colorfulness in the overall effect.

The condensed drawings seem to move visually and are thus reminiscent of Op Art works of the 1960s. For some drawings, this movement is now actually set in motion in a virtual animation (augmented reality AR versions).