East/West and the Oracle of the South

Bettina Scholz paints pictures that are reminiscent of alchemical pours and drips of paint. Many viewers tend to see apocalyptic worlds in them, according to Max Dax, who invited the artist to the Deichtorhallen for » HYPER!« in the summer of 2019. This notion is hardly surprising, given that her vibrantly luminous pictures, painted on and behind glass, are the result of an exploration of sacred church art, Gothic book illumination, and the visual and musical world of contemporary fantasy and science fiction formats. Though there are also quite specific references to films such as Ridley Scott’ s » Blade Runner« , the » Dune« films based on the epic novels by American writer Frank Herbert, Andrei Tarkovsky’ s films » Solaris« and » Stalker« with their film music by Edvard Artemiev, as well as to the sound of the techno label Underground Resistance. Bettina Scholz works on acrylic glass, as well as on wood or canvas, and her drawings, objects, and installations reflect not least the visual influences of her childhood former East-Germany (GDR).

Matthia Lö bke (*1963) is an artistic director of the Kunstverein Heilbronn, is curator and publishes monographic catalogs, among others about Georg Baselitz, Martin Creed, Gü nther Fö rg, Georg Herold, Markus Lü pertz, Olaf Metzel, Anselm Reyle, Michael Schmidt, Michael Venezia, and Silke Wagner. In Cologne at the late 1980s she was an assistant to Donald Judd and gained her doctorate on Dan Flavin. Max Dax (*1969) was editor-in-chief from 2007 to 2010 of SPEX, a famous German music magazine, well known in the scene from the beginning on as the organ of Punk and New Wave. The special topic of Max Dax’ are Interviews which he did with a couple of hundreds of artists based in Music business, Art scene or both. Also he is still a permanent author for the daily papers WELT and TAZ. For Deichtorhallen Hamburg he curated 2020 the show HYPER! A Journey into Art, and Black Album/White Cube 2021 at Kunsthal Rotterdam. Bettina Scholz is since 2021 professor at the Alanus academy in Mannheim and lives in Berlin, and from 2014 until 2021 she was a lecturer for drawing at the University of Arts in Berlin. Her post-graduated MFA she had in 2012 at Kunsthochschule Weissensee, the year before she went to Chelsea College of Arts in London. Since her master degree she had several gallery shows especially in Berlin, but also in Basel, Cologne, Dusseldorf, Hamburg, Montreal, Munich, New York, Turin, Vienna, and Zurich. She participated with her big abstract glass paintings 2019 at HYPER! A Journey into Art and Music.