Bettina
Bucher-Schmidt

I am a visual artist. Born and raised in Heilbronn, Germany, I lived, worked and studied in Belgium, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, Singapore and South Africa.

In 2018 I returned to Germany after 34 years living abroad and I have settled down in Wachtberg near Bonn.

I studied Interior Basic Design at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in Singapore, was a student of the Academy of Fine Arts in Watermael-Boitsfort, Brussels, Belgium, and have attended courses on art and architectural history at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-University Bonn. I continuously pursue further training through practical workshops in the fields of drawing, painting and object making.

I am a Finalist Artist of Arte Laguna Prize 20, 2025, in the painting section. Since 2024 I exhibited my works in Galleries (Bonn, Madrid, Bologna), at International Art Fairs (Innsbruck Art Fair, ArtExpo New York) and Museums (Barcelona MEAM).

My practice is grounded in collage as a form of structural research. Moving across painting, works on paper, and mixed media, I approach the canvas as a site of excavation, where the image retains the trace of its own making. My work unfolds through a procedural cycle of ‘decisional thresholds.’ Each piece begins with an accumulation of elements, including colours and forms, which are then subjected to radical editing. At each stage, I make a deliberate technical choice. Collage fragments are either consolidated into the composition or covered over and removed from view. These discarded elements are often buried beneath new strata or stripped away, leaving visible scars and textures. What remains emerges as the residue of successive acts of demolition and reconstruction.

I am interested in shapes, colours, spaces, structures (both in nature and urbane spaces), texturality, and perspective. My topics are nature and animals, environmental issues such as plastic pollution of the oceans, and global warming, cities of the future, interior spaces and design as well as social-political areas.