After studying freelance art at the Hdk Bremen, Bettina Merz decided to go another path by studying stage and costume design at the art academy HFBK (Wilfried Minks) and HAW (Dirk von Bodisko) in Hamburg, Germany. A couple of years, she worked for internationally renowned houses, where her artistic ability to express herself as a costume and stage designer received special attention from well-known directors such as George Tabori and Hans Neuenfels.
During these years, painting was considered a constant (faithful) companion in Bettina Merz´s creative process. Nevertheless, it still took time to be able to give herself a separate, independent place for a creative freedom as a dialogue.
“For me, painting is a dialogue with myself in order to create a world order that does me justice”
Acrylic paint, pigments, brushes. These are the tools with which Bettina Merz creates worlds full of color intensity on large formats. For her works, there must be no stretcher frames covered with linen, since the artist wants to feel the resistance of walls in her work, which challenges her in an impressive manner on large areas of linen fabric or optionally paper surfaces.
Bettina Merz paints intuitively. Therefore the processes are developed in a further course of which she neither can or wants to have control of.
“..let arise. Sometimes also depict. Destroy. Destroy with all your strength. Form again. Rediscover and destroy again. Until suddenly something is left behind. An invention. Something that has nothing to do with you, that arose out of the act and the situation, that maybe has only the smallest to do with you.”
The choice of paint applications is also done with a certain self-forgetfulness. Several colores areas are often layered on top of each other, even whole book pages or optionally text excerpts are implemented, so that an almost three-dimensional effect becomes visible.
“And sometimes I destroy to provoke myself to get to the deep, deep moments that´s holding me.”
The artist oevre encompasses a pictorial world shaped by narration, impulsive and passionate, and demonstrates her unerring sense of material, color and space.
(Katharina Mokross, April 2022)