Galerie Fenna Wehlau - Yellow Fields - Bettina Bürkle

Bettina Bürkle has been working primarily with acrylic glass for almost 20 years now. Contrary to popular expectation, however, the materials she uses do not give the impression of misanthropic machine art or technoid coolness, as is known to be inherent in many works of concrete art. On the contrary, the technical precision of the craftsmanship, the manufactured nature of these objects, is completely in the background in favor of their actual color-light effect and represents - comparable to the expert handling of canvas and paint, for example in the field of painting - a merely self-evident prerequisite for professional artistic work.

Already in earlier groups of works Bettina Bürkle had evidently referred to the window "as the iconographic starting point of her works, because one of the basic concepts of the picture is connected with it, the mediation between two spaces: inside and outside, experience of a real and an imagined space."

The use of the translucent, translucent material (acrylic glass) must therefore seem only logical. In this way, the sliding objects, as the artist calls them, enable the freely variable staggering and overlapping of color and depth spaces in order to make it possible for the viewer to experience variable color qualities, refractions of light, and cast shadows on his or her own terms - comparable, for example, to glazing techniques in painting.

In 2018, the large color-light cube was created, which, standing free, not only allows the viewer to walk around the entire color and light space, but, in the absence of floor and ceiling panels, is also able to challenge the viewer to look into the interior of the cube from a stooped or inverted posture - from below or from above - and repeatedly provokes new irritations of perception.

In any case, a mysterious inner radiance emanates from the prismatic edges of the individual discs, as if they were fed by a somehow invisible electrical source. If one approaches the spatial structures shown in view, above or through, it remains uncertain, depending on the angle of view and the observer's position, whether we are dealing with openly permeable or rather closed bodies, on whose crystal-clear invisible surfaces we would almost inevitably have bumped, and in whose reflections we could rediscover all kinds of light reflections of the surrounding reality (depending on the respective daylight or artificial light) and unawares also our own reflection. However, the glass that is thus translucent and its supposedly easy mobility on the aluminum rails also ensure transparency in a broader sense than they assert the continuous mutability of knowledge and of perception in general - as open systems, so to speak, and thus also endowed with poetic expansiveness.

Although Bettina Bürkle's works are made of industrial-technical materials (the cutting edges, angles and all their connecting mechanisms are also technically precise), they nevertheless simultaneously generate a dematerialization of spaces that are believed to be statically enclosed. In view of the versatile sliding and adjusting mechanisms made of aluminum and wood, analogies may even be drawn to late medieval winged altars, which knew how to reveal different sequences of images and constellations in their devotional spaces depending on the course of the year and liturgical requirements. While the use of colored glass may draw an obvious connection to the architecture of Gothic cathedrals, which were able to completely dispose of the earthly heaviness of human existence through the immaterial glow of wide-span window surfaces in the interior, Bettina Bürkle's retables, which have been profaned in modern times, can be understood as modular color spaces that are energetically charged by spiritual forces of a completely different kind.

- Clemens Ottnad