“Non-Waiver” is the late artist Bettina’s second solo exhibition at Ulrik in New York. The show features two series: untitled self-portraits made in the 1970s and wooden sculptures realized between 1977–81. Both series concern Bettina’s method of the “random constant.”

Bettina made the untitled self-portrait silver gelatin prints  in her bathroom, which she turned into a darkroom. Bettina often described her apartment as the “Institute for Noumenological Research,” a nod to her sometimes humorous engagement with Kantian philosophy. In these works, the “eclipse of the self” is staged through her fixed-perspective method, while the column-like cropping of the photographs echoes the verticality of New York’s architecture.

Bettina produced the wooden sculptures while living on a liquid diet, noting in her description of this series that she had not eaten solid food for an entire month, due to the rent increase of her woodworking shop. She used only a belt sander to arrive at the permutations of the wave-like motif, recurrent throughout her practice. She describes the volume redistribution in these works in terms of “symmetry and asymmetry in non-waiver balance points. 

Born in Brooklyn in 1927, Bettina lived and worked at the Chelsea Hotel from the 1970s until her death in 2021, maintaining a prolific conceptual practice that rejected the singular art object. She developed an interconnected body of work spanning photography, xerography, film, video, computer-assisted animation, painting and sculpture. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Ulrik, New York (2024); Césure, Festival d'Automne, Paris (2023); The Hessel Museum, Annandale-on-Hudson (2023); and Les Rencontres d'Arles (2022).

The exhibition runs until November 1st.