General 1 — HELM CONTEMPORARY

Bettina Blohm

BAUSTEINE

May 28 - June 28, 2025

Helm Contemporary is pleased to present Bausteine, an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Bettina Blohm, opening Wednesday, May 28th. Dividing her time between New York and Berlin for over three decades, Blohm has developed a practice rooted in abstraction and shaped by a sustained investigation into color, structure, and form. The title Bausteine—German for “building blocks”—alludes to the artist’s methodical yet intuitive process: constructing compositions through accumulations of bold linear elements and chromatic shifts. Marked by rhythmic tensions and spatial restraint, Blohm’s works invite prolonged looking. Shapes edge toward architecture but remain fluid—resolutely painterly, and deeply attuned to perception.

Helm Contemporary’s show is “Bausteine” by Bettina Blohm, a German painter who divides her time between New York and Berlin. The word means building blocks in German and can be read as a reference to both the rectilinear forms that dominate her paintings (only one includes a diagonal) and the slow process of accumulation that might occupy a child at play or a manual laborer. Blohm’s paintings are notably resistant to digital representation. Online images convey an offhand playfulness but none of the rigor and insistence evident in the gallery. Fully experiencing this work requires attention to the way countless brushstrokes reaffirm the picture plane and the horizontal and vertical axes of the rectangle. The sense of repetition and slow accumulation of tonal nuance infuse the image and transform it into something archaeological, a record of experience. The slippage between the seen and the felt is a hallmark of what we call “painterliness.” At its worst, this quality can be nothing more than a style, a cheap register of assumed emotion or authenticity, but in Blohm’s case it is poised against the restraint of the repeated minimal gesture and tied to the axes of the support, generating tension between looseness and structure, mind and body, expansion and containment.

—Adam Simon, Two Coats of Paint, June 06, 2025

Bettina Blohm, born in 1961 in Hamburg, Germany, studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich from 1980 to 1984. She moved to New York City in 1984 and opened a second studio in Berlin in 2008. Recent solo exhibitions include “A Pause in Process” at Kajetan Berlin (2025), “Bettina Blohm – Works on Paper” at Gallery Biedermann, Munich (2023), and “Daylight” at Werner Klein Gallery, Cologne (2022). Her work has also been featured in places like The Painting Center, New York (2016), Kunsthalle Bremen (2013), and Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2009). Blohm’s art is included in many permanent collections, such as the Berlinische Galerie and the Städel Museum in Frankfurt. She currently lives and works in New York and Berlin.

May 28 - June 28, 2025

Biography