It was on the screen of a smartphone that I saw one of Bettina Krieg’s drawings for the first time. Blue lines as fine as the grooves of a fingerprint covered the glowing white surface. Bettina Krieg and I had just met at a garden party near Berlin. It was raining when we arrived, and then suddenly the sun came out and as we talked, the garden grew humid. She asked me what I do, and I asked her the same. When she said she was an artist, I asked, “Where can I see your work?” I started wondering if the question might have been a mistake, since I didn’t know how to continue the conversation if I didn’t like her work, but already we were pulling our smartphones out of our pockets and the first picture flashed onto the screen. I leaned over to get a better look, zooming in on the drawing with two fingers. Strange, I thought, at first glance it looks so ordered and precise, almost mechanical—or as though it had been made with a stencil. On closer inspection, however, the many small irregularities emerged. The marks were sometimes heavier, sometimes lighter, sweeping to the side or suddenly breaking off, like tracks in sand made by ants dragging supplies home to their colony. I noticed my perception wavering back and forth between these different effects, and so we arranged to meet at the studio so that I could see the originals. Or I would come to her next exhibition, I said.

Bettina Krieg arbeitet mehrere Tage oder Wochen an einer Zeichnung. Ihre großformatigen Blätter zeigen abstrakte Linienverläufe aus feinem Silber, Gold, Kupfer, Blau- oder Grün-Metallic. Die organischen Strukturen lösen eine Vielzahl von Assoziationen bei der Betrachtung aus, die von der Künstlerin nicht beabsichtigt, aber auch nicht verneint werden: Muskelfasern, Pflanzenwachstum, Wellenverläufe oder Wüstenlandschaften.

By contrast the untitled drawings of Bettina Krieg have a thoroughly integrated sense of pattern and loosely associative topographical presence. This said there is often no actual sense of fixed starting point for a given drawing, no immediately asserted sense of a pre-di-rected beginning. For while the drawings have an initial feeling and emotionally decentred aspect – a rhizome – based discontinuous appearance – nonetheless each drawn and articulated interior element almost naturally enfolds into the next through the artist`s use of dense interwoven lines, which in turn relate to a clearly delineated and highly developed hatching system. In this they have a strangely organic visual presence, and sometimes lattice-like sense of pictorial-horticultural landscaping.

The Martin Mertens art gallery is showing in How long is a piece of string recent works by the artist Bettina Krieg. Her drawings are in black and white, as well as flat blue and silky golden tones. Fine lines, drawn with a paintbrush and ink, a quill and a fineliner, stretch over large and small sheets of paper. For the first time the artist is showing her latest works – more abstract and reduced than ever before.

Krieg findet die figurativen Bausteine ihrer Bilder in ihrem täglichen Umfeld. Mit ihrer Kamera hält sie verrostende Fahrräder, kahle Bäume, Ruinen und andere Objekte, die sich im Prozess des Vergessen-werdens und der Zersetzung befinden, fest, und katalogisiert sie in einem stetig wachsenden Archiv, auf das sie in der Komposition ihrer Arbeiten zurückgreifen kann.

Krieg finds the figurative building blocks of her paintings in her everyday surroundings. With her camera she files rusting bikes, naked trees, ruins and other liminal objects in order to archive them in an ever-growing catalogue of forgotten form and aesthetic potential that she can draw from in composing her works.

Seit langem ist die Zeichnung auch eigenständiges Kunstwerk, das, wenn nicht Welten, dann doch große Szenarien entfaltet. Sieht man sich bei aktuellen Zeichnern um, reicht das Spektrum von dunklen Vergangenheits-Fiktionen (Marcel van Eeden) bis zu feiner Niemandsland-Kartographie (Jorinde Voigt). Aber es gibt relativ wenige Künstler und Künstlerinnen, die das Zeichnen zu ihrer Hauptbeschäftigung machen. Zu diesen Wenigen gehört Bettina Krieg

In the beginning was the octopus. Topographic clouds made up of plants, animals and morbid branches, fragments of human existence in the process of disappearing, industrial parts, architectural elements and machine components grow into living ‘drawing organisms’– powerful and determined yet at the same time transitory and fragile.

Zwei verblüffende Eigentümlichkeiten fallen zunächst im zeichnerischen Werk von Bettina Krieg auf. Obwohl die Künstlerin ihre Motive einem Wust an Informationen verdankt – eigenen Fotos, Materialien aus Printmedien und dem Netz – und obwohl es sich in ihrer vergnügten hintergründigen Aufzählung dieser Bestände ihres Archivs überwiegende um Strandgut unserer Zivilisation handelt, von zerfallenden Gebäuden bis zu Schrottplätzen, frönt sie mitnichten einem melancholisch-romantischen Kult des Ruinösen.