A déjà vu may set in on the viewer when confronted with the sophisticated abstractions of Michael Bette in the gallery Luzán. Sometimes triangles, parabolas and individual letters dance on the canvas, adding rhythm to the picture surface with the paint. Then a framework of different colored lines spreads out, swinging forwards and backwards as it were. The square with its variations rhombus and parallelogram is not neglected either. The palette becomes the constitutive element, sometimes there are light pastel tones in fine nuances, then strong, luminous colors on a black background, which at the same time becomes the building block of the picture composition. Bette chose his “signs” intuitively, and then integrated them into a precisely planned composition in his meticulous painting.
Even before his studies at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in the 1960s, which Bette completed as a master student of the informal painter Gerhard Hoehme, he came into contact with Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, who, with the ZERO group they founded in 1958, created a zone of silence and silence wanted to create meditation in the West German post-war scene. Bette himself took part in Piene’s kinetic “Light Ballets”, but returned to the traditional canvas painting at the beginning of the 1970s and continued to pursue abstraction in his own way. He remained a loner, experimenting with formats, colors and forms, combining them in a sophisticated way in order to suggest space within the two-dimensional image carrier. He never belonged to a specific group, even if echoes of Optical Art or Constructivism can be found.
Some of his portrait formats are frighteningly narrow
Luzán presents works from the 1990s to 2017, when Bette had to give up her artistic work for health reasons. Born in Posen in 1942, he died in the summer of 2022 shortly before his 80th birthday in Berlin, where he had lived and worked since 2002. From 1992 to 2011 he held a professorship for artistic principles at the Potsdam University of Applied Sciences.
Sometimes he applied his abstractions, to which he gave no titles, on frighteningly narrow vertical formats, which he called “stelae”. With his small formats, he also painted the edges of the stretcher to continue the composition. In some of his paintings, he achieved an amazingly sculptural effect by layering rectangles next to one another, spanned or connected by arches, which the viewer can read parallel to the picture, depending on the perspective. No work is like the other, painting becomes a language of signs that replaces the word with color and geometry. Prices range between 1400 and 38,000 euros. (Gallery Luzán, Fasanenstr. 68, to 28.1., Tue-Fri 11 a.m.-6 p.m., Sat 12-3 p.m.)
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