BETTINA BUCK

ANOTHER INTERLUDE [2015]

Bettina Buck’s practice exists in a state of poised contradiction — sculpture that is at once grounded and ephemeral, playful and profound, rooted in tradition yet defiantly anti-modernist. Her work resists easy categorization, oscillating between performance and object, gesture and form. With an astute sensitivity to material and context, Buck transformed the everyday — foam blocks, carpets, cardboard, latex — into sculptures that pulse with quiet tension and strange beauty.

In her video Another Interlude, Buck revisits the terrain of her 2010 piece Interlude, in which she moved through a pastoral landscape bearing a large foam block. The earlier work reads like a minimal, absurdist ballet — Buck’s slow, deliberate movements turn the soft, unwieldy form into a tool of spatial negotiation. In Another Interlude, the action migrates indoors to the galleries of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna (GNAM) in Rome. The shift from landscape to architecture, elemental to curated space, charges the piece with new implications. Her body — engaged, burdened, graceful — becomes a conduit through which sculpture is activated and destabilized. It’s not just about mass and form, but about what it means to move through, inhabit, and resist space.

The video is shown alongside two intimately scaled works: a gelatin silver print restaging Man Ray’s The Coat-Stand (1920), and a small marble sculpture from Buck’s studio. These pieces act as quiet anchors to the performance, evoking Buck’s deep dialogue with sculptural history and her talent for drawing unexpected connections across time. There’s a deliberate friction here — between the polished, canonical image and Buck’s lived, embodied response to it; between permanence and impermanence, memory and immediacy.

Buck’s sculptures often have an uncanny, anthropomorphic presence. They slouch, lean, balance; they seem to breathe or rest. Displayed at unconventional heights or awkward angles, her works engage the viewer physically and psychologically, creating what she called “a tremor, a vibration and a conversation with their surroundings.” They simultaneously invite and repel, playing on binaries of presence and absence, natural and artificial, monumental and makeshift.

Despite their often abstract surfaces, Buck’s works carry traces of narrative and myth. There’s something archetypal in their forms — echoes of classical drapery, fragmented statues, or votive offerings — filtered through a contemporary, industrial lens. Her materials are loaded with histories, yet reconfigured to jolt the viewer out of passive looking.

Bettina Buck’s art never settles. It pushes, pulls, drags, leans. It asks us not just to see, but to feel the space between body and object, gesture and form, time and material. In a world obsessed with polish and permanence, Buck’s sculptures remind us of the power of instability — and the quiet, radical beauty of things in motion.

Bettina Buck passed away in Berlin in 2018. I had the great privilege of working with her. Her artistic vision, sensitivity to material, and uncompromising approach left a lasting impact on me. This project is not only a collaboration, but also a quiet tribute to an artist who deeply inspired my own path.