Bettina Krieg’s latest series, the Sleep Studies, extends her exploration of line and rhythm into the intimate, liminal spaces of consciousness. Working once again primarily in black ink on paper, Krieg charts the ephemeral territories of sleep, where perception drifts between clarity and dissolution. The drawings unfold as delicate networks of marks, each line both tracing and questioning the flow of thought, sensation, and memory.

In these works, the rhythms of slumber are rendered visually: subtle pulses, pauses, and oscillations create a landscape of unconscious motion. Dense, filigree structures emerge alongside voids, suggesting both the presence and absence of awareness, while the linear continuity of her marks evokes a temporal unfolding, as if each drawing were a recording of the mind in transit. The compositions resist literal depiction, instead offering an open-ended cartography of the interior, a space in which the viewer’s own attentiveness completes the terrain.

Krieg’s process remains intuitive yet rigorous. She allows the lines to develop organically, responding to a mixture of personal experience, physiological rhythm, and imaginative impulse. This produces a delicate tension between control and surrender, between the precise modulation of space and the spontaneous emergence of pattern. Across the series, one senses the oscillation between microcosmic detail and expansive, almost cosmic breadth, as if the same force animating cells or waves also structures the mind in sleep.

The Sleep Studies echo Krieg’s long-standing engagement with natural forces and elemental movement, particularly water, while introducing a temporal dimension—drawing as both mark and measure of fleeting experience. Like her previous works, these drawings operate at the intersection of observation and intuition, pattern and improvisation, offering a unique visual language that is simultaneously rigorous, sensorial, and deeply meditative. In witnessing these drawings, one is invited to inhabit the fragile, shifting territories of perception, where the act of looking mirrors the oscillations of consciousness itself.