In Gabriela's productions we find the trauma as a fact that happened, and that drives the stories, the narrations, the images. But also as a void, a break, a limit that seems irreducible - "internal to the structure" -: a center on which images, words, and stories swing. For Bettini, the story is central. Between History and singular stories, it sometimes seems that there is only a difference in scale. But to build the memory many times it is necessary to invent, where the gaps of memory and the emptiness of trauma institute history as lost.

- Debora Mauas

Recuerdos Inventados collects fictitious situations and captures how the artist imagines some moments in her life if the violence of State Terrorism in Argentina in the 70s had not made them impossible. In this eagerness to build history and memories, Bettini reviews the stories of the generation that lived through the Argentine dictatorship, and links it directly to her biography. Through photographs in which she simulates encounters with members of her family who disappeared during the military dictatorship, the series invents a hypothetical relationship with them in an attempt to create a new space in time and distance, through imagined conversations.

Gabriela makes the authority of photography disappear by intervening on the real meaning of family portraits. Returning to the photograph that was used in the human rights marches to claim for the disappeared, she expands or rectifies her complaint.

Gabriela Bettini weaves and weaves stories and arguments, like a hardened Penelope. And, against the light of the fabric of her stories, one can glimpse, without the slightest cloud, the construction of a personal story. In the arguments of the stories, there are present objects and forethought people, moments stopped in time and life that passes as a continuum, as if nothing happened, as if nothing had happened.

- Luis Fernando Vilchez Martin

In 2011, through the drawings of Las historias son como lugares, the artist shows affective tours of domestic spaces in Argentina. As if time had stopped, the apparently inert objects depicted reveal a series of stories, actions, memories and personal stories. With a recognizable language and a familiar image, such as a bed, a chair or a mirror, Bettini manages to place the viewer on a threshold between reality and the invented. The viewer understands that there is a story, a narrative of something that has already happened or that may happen.

The artist hopes that whoever contemplates one of these works will feel something similar to what led her to do it: a mixture of surprise and emotion.

La Casa Despojada represents Bettini's journey to visit a family home in Argentina where, in 1977 during the military dictatorship, four people were murdered within the power of the army. Combined with a video as a documentary record of searches or actions, the artist opens doors and windows and dresses the walls with objects drawn by her in a poetic and restorative action. It is an ephemeral intervention on bare and riddled walls, in an impossible attempt to restore a certain warmth and a sense of home to the place.

Drawing always accompanied her, and it was perhaps the most precise way to rehearse the ways in which she imagined things, places, and people. In the midst of so many stories heard, being able to locate his own, marking a space that was temporalized through his strokes. Then came the other languages.

- Debora Mauas

In Gabriela Bettini's work the trace is always present, which is suggested but not seen, which even if we pretend that it no longer exists, it will forever be. From a piece of furniture there is the accumulated dust underneath, from a chandelier there is the halo of its burning, from a car there are the traces of the road made, of a human being ... what? The artist's dilemma is to represent that person who does not collect dust but transforms herself into it, who does not catch fire but burns, who does not leave traces on a road but on her fellow beings.

- Iván Buenader

The video for La casa roja, made as a "road movie", is the result of Bettini's journey through Czechoslovakia in 2013 to locate the place where the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt and her mother escaped from Germany in 1933. Reference texts, maps and people with whom the artist meets on the way provide data and information that allow her to approach a decisive time and place in the life of the thinker and find the land where the house was located: crossed along the border between Germany and Czechoslovakia it served as a refuge for all those seeking to leave the country.

Thanks to the drawings that, full of poetic and personal licenses that reflect the environment of the spot, Bettini completely transports the viewer to the moment in which both women pass through the strategic place, also managing to recreate the tense atmosphere that the act of escape entails.

The houses have to be a stable place. In this case, it is a place of transit, a kind of safeguard that allows escape.

- Gabriela Bettini

In 2015, with Larga Distancia Bettini continues to talk about the migratory experience and shows the different ways of approaching the past. The scenes of the paintings and drawings of the old immigrant hotel in Buenos Aires highlight stories full of hopes and fears that are complemented by the video conversation between a grandmother and her granddaughter. In it, both discuss the same historical and political events in their country and the way in which they have affected them and led them to live in distant places. The approach that takes place in this meeting reflects flight, exile, migrations and disappearances but also love ties, which link three generations and three different settings in the history of this family: Kessab, Buenos Aires and Madrid.

Bettini's work presents different layers of information, and it is the use of the word, the document and the image, which ends up generating the encounter with the real, with the story behind the piece.

From the fragility of the human condition, Gabriela Bettini's work is a reconciliation between two worlds, two countries, two realities, two halves.

- Mireia Puigventos

Gabriela Bettini's painting in a first approach is colorful, exultant and accessible to the eye. The eye is recognized in her images and this rapid "recognition" easily introduces us into her paintings. Once inside, through the door of beauty and complacency, embarrassment and analysis take place. We perceive that the composition, the chromatic decisions and the scales of the motifs construct a critical discourse for which the artist requests our attention and reflection.

– Susana Blas

The feminist and environmentalist commitment of the artist lead her to investigate, on one side, if there is a link between violence against women and against nature, and, on the other, if women who defend nature suffer a specific type of violence for the fact of raising their voice against the great powers. This investigation makes Battini set her starting point and reflections on the work of other women in history of the ecofeminism.

For Primavera Silenciosa, in 2018, Bettini borrows the title of Rachel Carson's eponymous book, where the author raises the urgency of protecting the natural environment and gives voice to Vandana Shiva, an Indian writer, who denounces the consequences of the exploitation of the monocultures. As a result of the influence of these women, Bettini appropriates the illustrations of the German scientist Maria Sibylla Merian and represents them covered by monocultures that become the protagonists of the paintings, as a metaphor for the threat they pose to biodiversity.

In Terra Nuillus Bettini goes one step further, and transforms Marianne North's illustrations into absences. The paintings are inserted into wooden grids that recall geometric abstraction and man's desire to rank the elements through a scientific approach to art.

The artist's delicate work brings us back to the world of the pioneers of scientific and/or botanical landscape painting at a time when expeditions were carried out spanning the entire globe and having its peak in the 19th century. These expeditions went to the 'rescue' of a hidden and remote world, beyond the limits dominated by western man, to bring it before the eyes of the public from main metropolis.

Inspired by Los monocultivos de la mente (Vandana Shiva, 1993) Bettini makes a parallel between the strength of monocultures and the imposition of the culture of others. While monocultures are imposed among indigenous species, preventing them from growing and other creatures from surviving, the imposed culture eliminates the original ways of life, traditions and knowledge, which gradually causes an absence, an erasure.

This process of progressive erasure of everything that does not conform to the imposed model generates a crisis of presence that Bettini translates into silhouettes and absences of the plants and animals initially represented in 19th century paintings, which in many cases have already been extinct.

Issues of power, dependence, and identity have always crystallized in the aesthetic, practical, and conceptual dispute about nature and its properties. The artist draws the eye to the potency of established world views and creates experimental spaces for new narratives with a different outlook on the world.

- Katrin Steffen

Topografía del borrado acts like a magnifying glass on our understanding of nature, refracting our environmental references and their interpretation. Issues of power, dependence, and identity have always crystallized in the aesthetic, practical, and conceptual dispute about nature and its properties. The artist draws the eye to the potency of established world views and creates experimental spaces for new narratives with a different outlook on the world.

- Katrin Steffen

Binary thinking—nature on one side, culture and humans on the other—has always been a guiding difference characteristic of Western thought. The degradation of nature to a mere machine of production and reproduction at the service of humans is inseparably linked to the history of the European sciences. Against the backdrop of the massive appropriation of natural resources and landscapes, the question arises: How can knowledge about nature be obtained and conveyed as long as we believe in human supremacy? 

- Katrin Steffen

By focusing on nature representations, scientific techniques of musealization, and presentation, Gabriela Bettini reflects the codification of nature as a political, technological, and historico-cultural matter. The artist takes a critical look at knowledge concepts in natural history that are based on the assumption of nature and humans being separate.

- Katrin Steffen

Gabriela Bettini (b. Spain, 1977)

Gabriela Bettini, Spanish artist of Argentinian origin, was born in Madrid in 1977. Her current interests lie in the study of the first cultural colonialization and how it relates to its present-day legacy. Using the history of painting and the representation of landscape as her point of departure – observing how this medium may have been used to reinforce the ideas that form the basis of Western hegemony – she analyses today’s environmental crisis and the extractivist model it espouses, one where women become a paradigm of the multiple violence inflicted by climate change.

She has worked with the idea of memory in a series of pieces which revisit the dominant narratives of a generation that experienced the Argentinian dictatorship; these works directly link historical archives with her subjects’ own life stories. In her work, she has studied life experiences existing in the margins of History, revealing the voids that result when we attempt to reconcile memory, memory politics and official narratives.

Gabriela Bettini has exhibited at Borges Cultural Centre and Haroldo Conti Memory Cultural Centre, both in Buenos Aires, Tlatelolco Cultural Centre in Mexico City, House of Latin America of Lisbon, TEA Tenerife Space of Arts and the Argentine Foundation in Paris. She was awarded the Obra Abierta First Prize - Caja de Extremadura International Visual Arts Prize, the Madrid Region Visual Art Creation Grant and the MAEC-AECID Painting Grant at the Spanish Royal Academy in Rome. Other recognition include the Madrid Region Artistic Creation Award, Injuve Art Show or "la Caixa" Foundation and the British Council Grant for Postgraduate Studies in the United Kingdom.