Bettina ScholzOst / West und das südliche Orakel

Fantasy? Bettina Scholz paints pictures that look like alchemical pourings of colour, and so many viewers like to see apocalyptic worlds in them, as Max Dax writes, who had invited the artist to the Deichtorhallen for “HYPER!” in the summer of 2019. This association comes as no surprise, for her intensely luminous pictures, which she paints on and behind glass, arise out of an engagement with sacred church art, Gothic book illumination and the visual and musical world of contemporary fantasy and science fiction formats. But there are also concrete references to films such as “Blade Runner” by Ridley Scott, the “Dune” films after “Wüstenplanet” by the American writer Frank Herbert, the films “Solaris” and “Stalker” by the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky and their film music by Edvard Artemiev, or to the sound of the techno label Underground Resistance. Bettina Scholz’s painting, which she realises on acrylic glass as well as on wood or canvas, together with her drawings, objects and installations, reflects not least the visual influences of her childhood in the former GDR. It was there that her love arose for books of fairy tales, for the Jugendstil of the Golden Age of Illustration, for richly decorated Eastern European picture-book editions and for the colourfully printed, illustrated edition of the classic “Momo” by Michael Ende that had been smuggled into the country. For Bettina Scholz, products of the imagination have an enormous influence on what we call reality: “In an artistic context the fantastic, the invented, has nothing to do for me with escapism or trivialisation; on the contrary, it can stimulate independent thinking and even develop rebellious potential.” With the standstill of the 2020s she also began a series of sketchbooks which by now contain some 500 drawings and collages; extracts from them are presented here in the volume for the first time. The monograph shows pictures and exhibition views from the last ten years and is accompanied by experimental, autobiographical essays that provide insights into the making of the pictures and into the artist’s world of imagination.

Exhibition:
Kunstverein Heilbronn, 1/2 – 4/5/2025