Bettina Patermo
Bettina Patermo was born and raised in Upper Austria. She lives and works in Bad Waltersdorf and Vienna. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, taking a master class in graphic arts with Gunter Damisch and a master class in art in public spaces with Hubert Schmalix, and received her diploma in 2000.
Patermo spans a broad artistic spectrum across various creative periods. Her work reveals her as a precise observer and portrayer. Central to her practice is the act of capturing, understanding, and engaging with how people behave in different life situations and how they form relationships with one another. Her works, she says, arise from the attempt to make precisely this visible. With impressive painterly versatility—whether through measured objectivity, sensitive realism, or delicate introspection.
When he plays the piano, pianist Lang Lang says he feels like a painter: to him, notes are like colors. Curator Günther Oberhollenzer echoes this idea when he notes that Patermo’s paintings “possess a special musicality.” He elaborates: “As in a composition, their inner tension arises not from a single note, but from the relationships that unfold between the individual elements.”
“My painting is about closeness and distance,” explains Patermo, “about glances and gestures, about what exists in a space without revealing itself at first glance. Often these are not clear-cut actions, but rather tensions: a glance, an evasion, a hesitation, a physical relationship.”
She observes precisely that. How people reveal themselves, thoughtlessly, without intention. Without putting on a show. Patermo does not expose other people through her depictions. She portrays the figures in her paintings in a prototypical, realistic manner, not as specific individuals. She achieves this with keen insight, innocently, with a sense of the banal and the grotesque, and with humor. Without allowing herself to be dominated by her own feelings, which naturally underlie every creative act. Precise observation—and only this enables an accurate and truthful depiction—requires, as Patermo demonstrates, distance: from the observed world and from one’s own feelings.
She is relentless only with herself. She observes like a profiler. This is evident in her self-portraits. A diverse and complex interweaving of emotions can be read in the faces.
Her paintings are rich in color. Full of inner tension. They “move between figuration and abstraction, body and landscape, memory and invention,” notes Günther Oberhollenzer in his essay on Patermo’s monograph *Die Welt im Werden* (*The World in the Making*).
An excellent title. To become means to change. This applies to the world as a whole and, therefore, to the people who act within it. To cope with change, we must see what is changing. What is required is a passion for seeing—the fundamental prerequisite for true art. “In art, new perspectives mean feeling anew,” as David Hockney notes. Patermo explores the changing world—both the external and the internal—and, through her work, continually creates a new visual universe.
She does not impose a message. Instead, she offers—seriously and playfully—viewers material and space for their own explorations, associations, perspectives, and insights. She draws on sensuality and sparks the imagination. Her precision deserves special attention. Oberhollenzer comments: “What initially appears to be a figure may reveal itself as a movement of color. What seems like a background suddenly comes to the fore. A line can be a boundary and a connection at the same time. A surface can convey calm and generate tension simultaneously. Forms do not stand independently alongside one another. They react to one another, influence each other, and form a complex structure.”
Art moves us when it expresses emotions and thus appeals to the emotions of its viewers, stirring them to life when it touches them and creates a connection. Patermo offers us something special. Oberhollenzer sums it up: “Painting is feeling, but it is always also a form of thinking. Not thinking in terms of concepts, but rather in terms of material, color, and form. A way of thinking that does not first explain, but rather perceives. Patermo’s paintings remind us of this unique capacity of the medium. They do not show what the world looks like. They show how the world can come into being.”
