Galerie Gilla Lörcher

Contemporary Art

By using this website you agree to our / Durch die Nutzung dieser Website stimmen Sie unserer zu

Bettina Sellmann

Magic Every Day. Genre Paintings

Installation Views

Photo: Cordia Schlegelmilch, courtesy Galerie Gilla Loercher

Installation view: Bettina Sellmann 2013 at Galerie Gilla Loercher

Photo: Cordia Schlegelmilch, courtesy Galerie Gilla Loercher

Photo: Cordia Schlegelmilch, courtesy Galerie Gilla Loercher

Installation view: Bettina Sellmann 2013 at Galerie Gilla Loercher

Photo: Cordia Schlegelmilch, courtesy Galerie Gilla Loercher

Photo: Cordia Schlegelmilch, courtesy Galerie Gilla Loercher

Installation view: Bettina Sellmann 2013 at Galerie Gilla Loercher

Photo: Cordia Schlegelmilch, courtesy Galerie Gilla Loercher

Photo: Cordia Schlegelmilch, courtesy Galerie Gilla Loercher

Installation view: Bettina Sellmann 2013 at Galerie Gilla Loercher

Photo: Cordia Schlegelmilch, courtesy Galerie Gilla Loercher

Photo: Cordia Schlegelmilch, courtesy Galerie Gilla Loercher

Installation view: Bettina Sellmann 2013 at Galerie Gilla Loercher

Photo: Cordia Schlegelmilch, courtesy Galerie Gilla Loercher

Photo: Cordia Schlegelmilch, courtesy Galerie Gilla Loercher

Installation view: Bettina Sellmann 2013 at Galerie Gilla Loercher

Photo: Cordia Schlegelmilch, courtesy Galerie Gilla Loercher

Works

Acrylic on canvas 
<br>280 x 210 cm

Photo: Cordia Schlegelmilch

Magic Every Day, It’s glam-magic!, 2012

Acrylic on canvas
280 x 210 cm Photo: Cordia Schlegelmilch

Acrylic on canvas 
<br>45 x 40 cm

Privat collection
Photo: Cordia Schlegelmilch

She heard a little shriek, and a fall, and a crash of breaking glass, 2012

Acrylic on canvas
45 x 40 cm Privat collection Photo: Cordia Schlegelmilch

Press Release

/
Galerie Gilla Loercher is excited to present the exhibition Magic Every Day by painter Bettina Sellmann.
Pinks and purples, a relief-like pastiche paint handling and vintage, toy and fairy tale motifs dominate Bettina Sellmann’s works. Central to her examination is the nostalgia for a better and happy world within contemporary artificiality being promised by consumer and entertainment industry. Historically it was genre painting that created idealised versions of everyday life. With her new works Bettina Sellmann steps into this tradition and updates it by opening it to contemporary influences. In doing this, a Baroque portrait carries the same nostalgic charge for the artist as a Hello Kitty image. Without quoting kidult-stars and the industry´s media techniques superficially, the artist allows the material to develop its own potential to carry her paintings to excess and to a place where they become unusual and challenging. Bettina Sellmann’s paintings are unique in the way that classical painting processes are being stylistically hyperbolized and at the same time idiosyncratically transformed. Her variable technique encompasses haptic pastiche painting, multi-layered water color washes, fragmented abstracted structures and raw canvas.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalog, edition Galerie Gilla Loercher. With a text by Andreas Schlaegel.
Excerpt of the text by Andreas Schlaegel:
If you wanted to explain painting, language is surely not the right means to do so. It’s much too concrete,
arduous, time-based and cumbersome. A flirt could come closest, a coquettish and elusive approximation.
This is the quality one can find in the personages of Bettina Sellmann’s paintings, as well as in her painting
style itself, in the complex, association-inviting spaces she opens up by means of color, color handling and
absurd or matter-of-fact descriptive titles.
«It’s glam-magic!»
Her painting is glamorous and magic, but also «glam» as in glam rock and simply «magic» as in Queen’s song
«It’s a kind of magic».


Bettina Sellmann studied from 1992 to 1997 at Städelschule Frankfurt, Germany with Jörg Immendorff, Christa Näher und Thomas Bayrle (Meisterschülerin). She also holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Hunter College in New York City, where she lived and worked for 11 years. Since 2010 she lives and works in Berlin. She was awarded the Skowhegan Residency and the DAAD Jahresstipendium (German Academic Exchange Service Year Stipend), among others.
Her works have been shown in numerous galleries and institutions internationally (Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston; University Art Museum, Albany, NY; Derek Eller Gallery, NYC; Bronwyn Keenan Gallery, NYC; Fredericks Freiser Gallery, NYC; American Fine Arts, NYC; Gavin Brown Passerby, NYC; Greener Pastures Gallery, Toronto, Canada; Kinkead Contemporary, Los Angeles; Vienna Art Foundation; Villa Jauss, Oberstdorf; Galerie Frank Schlag, Essen; Wonderloch Kellerland, Berlin; among others) and are part of international private and public collections, such as the Olbricht Collection and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.