Bettina PousttchiSuspended Mies

The Arts Club of Chicago is proud to present Bettina Pousttchi: Suspended Mies. Berlin-based artist Bettina Pousttchi is best known for her large-scale photographic interventions in public space, covering entire facades of buildings with images redolent with historical or architectural meaning. In her photography and sculpture she further explores the connections between systems of time and space from a transnational perspective.

For her exhibition at the Arts Club of Chicago, the German-Iranian artist (born 1971, Mainz) has developed a new site-specific photo installation that responds to the work of architect Mies van der Rohe, who designed the famed “floating staircase” at The Arts Club. The installation is comprised of three parts that bring together Mies’s legacy in New York, London, and Chicago. The first part, a large-scale photograph of the Seagram Building printed on textile, extends the length of the entire west gallery; the second part addresses Mansion House Square, Mies’s unbuilt project for London; the third is The Arts Club’s own physical space. Visitors to the gallery are met with a space that employs photography as an architectural element, thus redirecting the viewing experience.

Research for this exhibition took place at the Villa Aurora, Los Angeles, where Pousttchi had a residency in 2016.

A graduate of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where she studied with Rosemarie Trockel and Gerhard Merz, Bettina Pousttchi has exhibited internationally since 2001 at such institutions as the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Phillips Collection, the Nasher Sculpture Center, the Kunsthalle Basel, and the Temporäre Kusthalle, Berlin. She currently lives and works in Berlin.