Bettina Pousttchi: Double Monuments

This summer, The Phillips Collection presents the work of German artist Bettina Pousttchi, which explores the history and memory of architecture. “Double Monuments” is part of the Phillips’s ongoing Intersections series that highlights contemporary art and artists in conversation with the museum’s permanent collection, history, and architecture.

Through photography and sculpture, Bettina Pousttchi is interested in altering architectural buildings and monuments as indicators of the past and mediums of remembrance. In her series Double Monuments for Flavin and Tatlin (2010–16), Pousttchi transforms the constraining materials of rails, street barricades, and metal crowd barriers into sculptural forms with spiraling vertical towers and neon light tubes. These “double monuments” reference the work of Russian Constructivist sculptor-architect Vladimir Tatlin from the 1920s and American minimalist artist Dan Flavin from the 1960s.

Five “Double Monuments,” ranging from 5 to 12 feet, will be on view at the Phillips, dramatically illuminating the space with neon lights. The sculptures will be paired with works from the permanent collection including Naum Gabo’s Linear Structure in Space No. 1 (1943) and black and white photographs from the 1930s and 1940s by Bernice Abbott, Louis Faurer, Alfred Eisenstaedt, and Gjon Mill—images that underline the theme of illuminated space presented in Pousttchi and Gabo’s works.

Best known for his architectural sculptures that emphasize negative space and translucency and suggest skyscrapers and industrial settings, Gabo creates work with a strong kinship to Russian constructivism, a movement which sought to overcome the static and monumental aspects of traditional sculpture and activate the surrounding space. Just as Gabo used glass, metal, and plastic to create fluid, almost transparent sculptures that emphasizes space, line, and movement, Pousttchi employs materials such as neon and powder-coated objects to create installations that address both sculptural form and architectural setting.

Double Monuments is exhibited concurrently with the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s “World Time Clock” series, a group of photographs Pousttchi created in 24 time zones around the globe over the last eight years. Together, these two exhibitions represent Pousttchi’s first museum presentations on the east coast of the United States.