NinaJohnson

Fusing a penchant for design, architecture, soft sculpture, and painting, Anna Betbeze creates work from a bevy of fur and fire. Fluffy wool carpets become blank canvasses for her violent interventions, where she lashes, contours, breaks, and then repairs the materials. It’s a sensuous process, marked by a stark ritualism, that serves as a meditation on the relationship between empathy and eroticism. Color is allowed to be fugitive; refusing to be pinned down, hues rapidly change, saturate, and mix amidst the controlled chaos. In this new batch of work, entitled “Hot Fruit,” the artist turns her staple creations around, revealing the rugs’ backsides and their sewn entrails. This new cobbled geometry is meant to act in concert with the immediate environment, allowing a dialogue with the gallery’s brutalist architecture. Along with large-scale wool works, Betbeze will also exhibit a new series made of burned paper for her debut at Nina Johnson Gallery’s new home, located in the heart of Little Haiti’s burgeoning arts district. 

To read the full artickle in ART LTD. MAGAZINE, CLICK HERE