Michael Bette

Paintings. The years 1988-1998

25 April to 21 June 1998

Introduction: Ralf Kulschewskij, art critic.
Lectures by:
Michael Bette "The Color Blue"
Torsten Olaf Enge, Düsseldorf, "Colour is existence".

With a clear gaze Bette (*1942) directs the eye to the cuts and wounds of the present and unfolds existence as a mode of mutual entanglement. He unmasks the apparent harmonies of communication models: Colour as discourse, colour as vision, colour as dispute, colour as inexorability. The medium of his message is form. To understand Bette's painting, it is necessary to look at the signs he uses: the tension between the pictorial and the autonomous sign. For although the concrete form of human, animal or plant is always echoed in them, they also appear to be delimited beyond the form of strictly divorced entities. Bed pictures are movement in a fundamental sense. This applies to the flow of signs on the surface, which is always based on an overall direction that leads the eye beyond the actual picture body. This reports that the inner reality of a phenomenon always points beyond its concrete, empirically determined form, that this inner richness can only be made visible in an exterior whose principle is constant transformation. Liveliness, the blind stream of life, opens itself to our contemplation only under the condition of form and structure. Therefore, Bett's pictures have a paradox to their reason. They visualize order as a condition of an imaginability of reality, and yet they always keep alive the memory of the beyond of this order. (after Heinz Liesbrock in: Michael Bette, exhibition catalogue).

Supported by the Grafschafter Sparkassenstiftung, the Brandenburgische Kunstsammlungen Cottbus, the City of Neuenhaus and the State of Lower Saxony