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until 21.06. | #4653ARTatBerlin | Galerie kajetan Berlin shows from Saturday, 26 April 2025 (Opening: 25.04.) the exhibition A Pause in Process by the artist Bettina Blohm.
Gallery kajetan is pleased to present A Pause in Process, the second solo exhibition of artist Bettina Blohm (*1961), who lives and works between New York and Berlin. On view are large-scale paintings and one drawing from the years 2019 to 2025, characterized by an abstract visual language with a geometric sensibility. Implied grids, serial — mostly square — forms, and multilayered color modulations shape Blohm’s painterly vocabulary. The exhibition title already hints at a central aspect of her practice: the pause within an open working process and the resulting shifts in compositional development that become the actual subject of her work.
Bettina Blohm, A Pause in Process, Ausstellungsansicht / Exhibition view 2025, Courtesy the artist & Galerie kajetan, Photo: Marcus Schneider
The exhibition opens with the painting Ascension (2023), presented in dialogue with the drawing From the Series: Veronica (2023). These two works enter into a tension-filled exchange and provide a compelling introduction to Blohm’s multifaceted visual language. The square-format painting Ascension appears to move vertically upwards: deep black rectangles, marked with traces of orange, dissolve into fragmented contours and open, delineated shapes. Due to their scale and pale coloring, these shapes exert a visual weight that counters the implied upward movement.
Bettina Blohm, A Pause in Process, Ausstellungsansicht / Exhibition view 2025, Courtesy the artist & Galerie kajetan, Photo: Marcus Schneider
The accompanying drawing likewise plays with our expectations. We see two deep black squares set against a greige color field and anchored within the picture plane — outlined by a delicate charcoal line as part of a white surrounding space. The lightness of the support, the chromatic dominance of the squares, and the layered structure of the drawing evoke an illusion of depth that Blohm deliberately subverts. The neutral greige — a blend of red, blue, yellow, and white — neutralizes the push-and-pull effect between black and white contrasts, and formally reflects both the outer charcoal contour and the square shapes themselves. The drawing remains horizontally organized and flat, affirming Blohm’s commitment to treating foreground and background on equal terms, and to disrupting presumed pictorial logics.
Bettina Blohm, A Pause in Process, Ausstellungsansicht / Exhibition view 2025, Courtesy the artist & Galerie kajetan, Photo: Marcus Schneider
A central structural element in Blohm’s painting is the grid. Unlike the rigid constructions of earlier modernist traditions, she employs the grid as an open reference system — offering orientation while simultaneously undermining it. Lines are drawn by hand, planes are subtly irregular, and distances between them fluctuate. The works approach the idea of order, yet resist full compliance. These intentional irregularities generate a dynamic tension between structure and deviation that sets the image in motion.
This simultaneity of structure and its conscious subversion is exemplified in works such as Into the Tuileries (2024). At first glance, the large painting appears clearly structured — serial square fields evenly distributed across the surface suggest a stable grid. Yet upon closer inspection, the distances vary, color fields overlap, and microstructures emerge. The composition is traversed by slight shifts and rhythmic irregularities that animate the pictorial field.
Power and Icon (2023) also resists fixed order. Squares along the left edge of the canvas are contoured on either three or four sides, forming a dividing line within the painting. Initially, the viewer believes to perceive a coherent system, formed by complementary pairs of shapes in both vertical and horizontal alignment. Upon closer examination, however, the axes reveal inconsistencies. The individual color fields are marked by translucent layers that — despite their chromatic intensity — render the composition permeable and open-ended.
Bettina Blohm, A Pause in Process, Ausstellungsansicht / Exhibition view 2025, Courtesy the artist & Galerie kajetan, Photo: Marcus Schneider
Blohm’s paintings develop through a long-term, phase-oriented working process, defined by interruption, revision, and repositioning. Compositions do not follow preparatory studies but evolve gradually in dialogue with the canvas. She often works on multiple paintings simultaneously, setting them aside during drying phases before returning with a fresh perspective. Colors are removed, areas are reworked, new painterly decisions are added. These visible revisions lend the surface its depth, its history, and a legible directional flow.
The titles of her works likewise emerge from this dialogic process. Rather than assigning predetermined meanings, they open associative fields of interpretation. Some, like A Space of One’s Own (2023) or Untitled (after Ivan Kljun) (2024), refer to literary or art historical contexts, while others — such as Gateway (2023) — are derived from the work’s formal language itself. The visual elements draw from architectural and landscape observation and function as structural devices as well as metaphorical projections.
“Paintings are material objects, but they also tell a story. Square, meander, maze or gate are images as well as metaphors.” — Bettina Blohm, 2024.
Bettina Blohm’s work unfolds at the intersection of two artistic traditions: the European Classical Modernism with its pursuit of compositional structure, rhythm, and formal autonomy, and the American tradition of process painting, where the act of making becomes the visible content of the work. Her paintings move between stability and dissolution, between system and its interruption, between construction and gestural expression. They present themselves as open structures — demanding a slow gaze and revealing their genesis step by step.
Eliza Grabarek M.A.
Bettina Blohm, A Pause in Process, Ausstellungsansicht / Exhibition view 2025, Courtesy the artist & Galerie kajetan, Photo: Marcus Schneider
Biography
Bettina Blohm (*1961 in Hamburg) lives and works in New York and Berlin. After studying painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich (1980–1984), she relocated to New York, where she has lived since and became a U.S. citizen in 2003. Since 2008, she has also maintained a studio in Berlin. Blohm works in a site-specific rhythm: her large-format paintings are created in New York, while her drawings — often developed outdoors and grounded in the observation of landscape and architecture — are produced in her studio in Berlin-Schöneberg. Her work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions across the U.S. and Europe, and is represented in public collections including the Berlinische Galerie, the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, and the Städel Museum in Frankfurt.
Opening: Friday, 25. April 2025, 6-7 pm
Exhibition dates: Saturday, 26 April – Saturday, 21 June 2025
Special opening hours: Gallery Weekend Berlin, Friday, 2. May 2025, 12-7 pm, Saturday and Sunday, 3. and 4. May 2025, 11-7 pm
To the Gallery
Bildunterschrift Titelbild: Bettina Blohm | Macht und Ikone | 2023 | 165 x 134,5 cm | Öl auf Leinwand | Foto: Cathy Carver
Ausstellung Bettina Blohm – Galerie kajetan Berlin | Zeitgenössische Kunst – Contemporary Art – Ausstellungen Berlin Galerien | ART at Berlin
