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.
The second time I saw a work by Bettina Krieg was on an invitation card for an exhibition in Kreuzberg, with a photograph of her lying on the floor in a sea of paper, drawing. Lines flowing toward the artist like waves; her pencil protruding like a fishing pole. I saw that the works were much larger than I had realized, too large to fit on a table, and so they had to be worked on lying down. A short time later, when I entered the exhibition space in Kreuzberg where the pictures were on view, I encountered the same marks and lines that I had already seen on the screen and in print. This time, I saw the many different ways in which they’re composed. The works hanging on the walls reminded me of waves or braided hair; muscle tissue, wood, metal discs, or imploding stars in space. The images depicted could have been miniscule or gigantic; there was no scale by which to discern the dimensions of the structures covering the paper. One moment, it felt as though I were peering through a microscope at something tiny that looked like fibers or rays spreading out in front of my eyes. The next moment it was like gazing into space through a telescope at galactic flashes of light, solar winds, and black holes. As I viewed the works, I grew and shrank like Gulliver in fast motion. One moment I was in Lilliput and the world turned miniature; a moment later I was in Brobdingnag, and everything was suddenly gargantuan. On top of this, I couldn’t shake off the feeling that the lines were moving slowly and rhythmically, like the pulse of a large living being.
When we meet in her studio in Kreuzberg near Südstern, Bettina Krieg says, “I can hear the pictures.” Gazing out the window onto the wide street below, it looks cleaner from above than when you’re actually walking along it. On the parquet floor is a large sheet of paper with the beginning of an image no larger than a bird’s nest. “What kind of sound do they make?” I ask her as I try to count the strokes to estimate how many more are required. I soon give up. “It’s darker, more like a hum,” she explains, turning around and heading to the kitchen to make tea. “Soundwaves!” I call after her, and I’m relieved because I finally remember what the feeling the drawings trigger in me reminds me of.
Several years ago, researchers found that certain people can hear frequencies lower than previously thought. Infrasound is the name given to sounds below 16 Hertz. For a long time it was believed that only very few animals could perceive them, for example elephants, giraffes, or whales. The deep, long sound waves are particularly well suited to communicating under water. And it’s these very sounds on the threshold of perception that I have to think of when I see Bettina Krieg’s work. Maybe the artist can hear them; her drawings have the same effect on me as sounds so quiet that I almost can’t hear them. I want everything to be very still so that I can concentrate on them.
Some of the artist’s earliest works are in the studio as well, the ones she began more than ten years ago after completing her studies at the Berlin University of the Arts. At the time, instead of lines, there were thousands of unrelated small objects piled up into large clusters, as if extraterrestrials had suspended a magnet over the Earth and pulled everything up from its place and gathered it into a dark corner of space. Each of the drawn objects has its source in Bettina Krieg’s image archive, which consists of photos, newspaper clippings, and postcards. She’s kept a list of the objects that have appeared in her drawings:
“Ruins (of all kinds, war ruins, abandoned, collapsing houses, burnt-out theaters and opera houses, etc.); sea animals; landscapes; junkyards; burnt-out, demolished cars; automobile graveyards; architectural elements; insects; birds; exotic and native plants; botanical gardens; human organs; water sources; waterfalls; water structures; machine explosions; machine parts; clockwork; gears; masks; skeletons; bone parts; picture frames; reptiles; broken windows; fish scales; feathers; tentacles; jellyfish; cells; cables.”[1]
From year to year, the many objects that once appeared in Bettina Krieg’s drawings have become reduced in number, dwindling to none in 2013. Instead, structures have evolved out of them in the way matter transforms into energy. In a new graphic novel about physicist Stephen Hawking, artist and author Leland Myrick has given black holes the shape of screened funnels. Circling, Hawking’s everyday objects—his socks, a can of soup, entire boxes with notes—disappear into them. In the end, all that remains are lines that run incessantly into the center.
The Swedish painter Hilma af Klint was convinced that her paintings would help us to enter a state in which “the sound of the world is silent before the quietude,” as she wrote in her notebook in 1919.[2] In this silence, the artist was able to perceive the soul of flowers, moss, and lichens, which she recorded in diagrams using dots, lines, arrows, and circles. The longer I look at Bettina Krieg’s drawings, the more I get the feeling that they, too, belong to a different temporal order, like the rings of trees.
“How do you know when a drawing is finished?” I ask Bettina Krieg. “When the sound feels right,” she replies.
When, after two hours in the studio, I collect my things and borrow a scarf before leaving, because it’s grown so cold outside, out of the corner of my eye I see a drawing hanging on the wall. And I could swear that it’s moved.
[1] Quoted in Ludwig Seyfarth, “Bettina Kriegs Weltlandschaften,” in: Bettina Krieg. Abysse, ed. by Thomas Andrae and Moritz Kaufmann, Cologne 2011, p. 50.
[2] Hilma af Klint’s notebooks are located in the Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk. The quote is from HaK 462, p. 1, translated here from the German.