Luxembourg & Dayan is delighted to present the first UK solo exhibition of Anna Betbeze (b. 1980). Opening 12th February, 2015, Plush Vision will feature a series of new works made especially for the Mayfair gallery. The New York-based artist has forged a reputation for works that involve experimentation and unlikely materiality. Using handmade Greek wool rugs known as ‘flokati’ in lieu of canvases, Betbeze submits their plush and shaggy expanses to a host of degradations, arriving at textural works that are remnants of often violent, external processes.
Betbeze mines material signifiers of time through her explorations of the painting’s surface. Through a ritualistic process that involves burning in the outdoors, she inscribes into the wool flokati the environment of their making. While they engage with the history of abstract painting, Betbeze’s works – created without the use of a brush, or canvas, or stretcher – simultaneously hark back to parallel histories of tapestry-mak- ing, functional design and the psychological underpinnings of the abject or formless object.
The title Plush Vision refers to a tangled sensory experience, which Betbeze describes as “when seeing becomes breathing, stroking, tasting, and sound – often simultaneously.” By invoking the visual, the tactile, and the auditory, these paintings offer viewers a place to commingle with their unfiltered desires.
The works in Plush Vision were made in the backyard of Betbeze’s childhood home in Georgia. Betbeze burns, dyes, cuts, folds, sews, and saturates the wool, charting an auto-destructive path for art-making that remains outside of the artist’s control. Contrasting with the pristine gallery space, the works challenge the notion that artworks appear “at home” in their exhibition surrounding. Instead, they make visible and insist upon the ethos of their creation. The paintings hold evidence of collapsed time, perhaps evoking a remnant, a ruin, a garden, or a home.
On view through to 2 April, 2015, Plush Vision will be accompanied by the artist’s first catalogue with new texts by critic and scholar Jarrett Earnest and artist Geo Wyeth (HW Clobba).
ANNA BETBEZE
Born 1980, Mobile, AL; raised in Columbus, GA. Lives and works in New York, NY
EDUCATION
2006 MFA Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT
2003 BFA University of Georgia, Lamar Dodd School of Art, Athens, GA 2001 Yale Summer School of Art and Music, Norfolk, CT
2000 Lamar Dodd School of Art, Cortona, IT
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2015
The University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA (forthcoming) 2013 Kate Werble Gallery, New York, NY
2012
Moons, Lüttgenmeijer, Berlin, DE
Wormholes, François Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
Anna Betbeze: New Work, MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA 2011 Moss Garden, Kate Werble Gallery, New York, NY
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2014
Histoires sans sorcière, La Maison De La Vache Qui Rit, Lons-le-Saunier, FR
Decorum, The Power Station, Shanghai, CN
Invitational Exhibit of Visual Arts, American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY CONCRETE GHOST, Gallery – Cryptoporticus - Casa Rustica, American Academy in Rome, Rome, IT
Beyond Earth Art: Contemporary Artists and the Environment, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
2013
See with Fingers, Barbara Walters Gallery, Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY My Crippled Friend, Columbus College of Art & Design, Columbus, OH
Decorum, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, FR
EXPO 1: New York, MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY
2012
First Among Equals, Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA
AWARDS & RESIDENCIES
2013-2014 Recipient of the Harold M. English/Jacob H. Lazarus – Metropolitan Museum of Art Rome Prize