In the hands of Bettina Gorn, photography is freed from the constraints of being a mere depiction of reality, becoming a medium of artistic reflection on time, mortality and memory. Gorn exhibits photographic images that focus on the human body, freeze-framing it in all its vulnerability and motion. The outer envelope of the material seems to have dissolved, making space for the energy of the spiritual. Blurriness here becomes a mode of capturing the body in the midst of action and movement. The artist is interested in visualizing the authentic, processual and experimental. The engagement with the question of identity, of the within and without, is given a new impetus.
Patricia Drück, PhD, Art historian
The artist Bettina Gorn danced for many years. In her photographs, she has developed her own unique notation, which allows her to capture the crucial element of dance: constant transformation. She does by using her own body: like the subject, Gorn is inside the movement of her very own rituals, not staggering or muddled, but deliberate and defining, her eye alert for the chosen section. Her sequence of steps is tailored precisely to her counterpart. She circles the turning subject and movingly fixes what is in motion.
In one of her series – a form of expression of which Bettina Gorn is particularly fond, as it allows the path of movement to be traced – Gorn centres her counterpart, but the figure never appears in the centre. Gorn’s sections often place their protagonists at the extreme edge of the picture, so their movements continue to billow out, lap over the edge in a whirl; the pent-up, sinewy energy seems clenched, captured, but liable to burst at any moment.
“Only in movement, however painful it may be, is there life,” wrote the Swiss art historian Jakob Burckhardt. Bettina Gorn’s photographs may be fixed, but there is movement in them. It needs no words.
Evelyn Pschak, Art Historian, Munich
…thanks to this reduction, one inevitably engages with the pictures individually – and then the diversity of the subject slowly begins to unfurl in one’s head…
Anja Blum, writing about „kopfsache“, Süddeutsche Zeitung
…next to that, Bettina Gorn’s large-format photo prints, massive and yet indefinable, billowing as if in a white fog: manifestations of the uncertain, which upon closer inspection turn out to be nudes, cowering bodies…
Klaus Schönmetzler, District Cultural Adviser Rosenheim
Some photographs by Bettina Gorn seem as though they wanted to make the invisible visible. Their subjects, though, are hardly wisible at all. They appear like passing thoughts, captured in the moment with a click. Others live by contrasts or put down vibrant spots of colour
Nicole Sutherland, about „kopfsache“, Ebersberger Zeitung
…bodies in motion, captured moments of a corporeality whose aesthetic quality invite us to linger…
Eva Mayer, Wasserburger Zeitung
Bettina Gorn has abandoned the naturalism that clings to the medium of film and photography. She detaches individual sequences from film, letting something new emerge. Her films can be experienced sensorily. The observer just has to let it happen.
Gerhard Sindelar, OVB Rosenheim
In her videos and photographies Bettina Gorn is celebrating an irritating futuristic view of the human being.
The World News about TimeDISplacement_2
Having studied music, design, and dance, Bettina Gorn has developed a unique language of expression that explores movement to capture transformation and externalize an internal reality. There’s something about her work that is reminiscent of the way Francis Bacon expresses an inner emotionality and psychological state.
Staged Photography 2022