Bettina Werner was born in Milan, Italy in 1965 and is the first artist to exclusively use salt as a medium. She is from Italy and now lives in New York City, United States. Bettina Werner has created works of art with salt techniques colored since the early 1980s.
Werner became an American citizen in July 2010 and currently has dual citizenship of the United States and from her native Italy.
Bettina Werner studied at Brera Art Academy, Italy. Her success with salt allowed Werner to come to the United States in 1989 and became more famous since the 1990s, when she was discovered at the age of 25 by Marisa del Re Gallery in America, one of the world’s most prestigious art galleries.
After that, she decided to move to the United States because according to Bettina, in the United States, there are a lot of art foundations and contemporary galleries everywhere and there are budgets that can support young artist to work. In America, being an artist can be a career even the Salt Queen Foundation can be established in America which is hard to manifest in Italy.
The crystallized salt texture is the reason that Werner attracts and encourages herself to explore more various combinations of textures and colors thus creating a unique and distinctive artistic language.
Her success with salt allowed Werner to come to the United States in 1989, where she began showing her work at the Marisa Del Re Gallery one year later.
All of her artwork has been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout Rusia, the United States, and Europe. All the museums including the Las Vegas Art Museum, Pushkin Museum in Moscow, Whitney Museum, Detroit Institute of Art, Chase Manhattan Bank, Herbert and Dorothy Vogel collections, and Martin Margulies collection in Miami.
In 2002, she founded The Salt Queen Foundation in New York, a foundation that aims to provide a venue for artists who use innovative techniques and unusual material. The institute is dedicated to the support and protection of artwork created with the unique textured of salt techniques that Werner invented in the 1980s.
Furthermore, the foundation aims to promote education about the importance of salt in human history and as a new art form, as well as to encourage the values used by other innovative artists working with different media.
Reviews and features on her work were published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, Il Corriere Della Sera, Elle, Hamptons Magazine, Architectural Digest, Elle Décor, The Chicago Tribune, The Miami Herald, ArtNews, GQ, Flash Art and the New York Post.
Bettina says that salt is the “Fifth Element” that is important to live on Earth. Salt is once more valuable than gold and even serves as the currency that makes the main trade all over the world, plus it has the essence of cleansing and healing.
Bettina is currently live in Lower Manhattan, where she contributes to her salt artwork. The work of salt crystal art is a real reflection that tells of her marvelous journey, as she harnesses the natural beauty through Sicilian salt to create a unique vision of life, love, and spirituality.
Bettina also wrote a book entitled “Bettina Werner: Queen of Salt published in Milan in 1999 and she celebrates 25 years of her creative arts journey with the Retrospective at 7 World Trade Center in New York City.
With climate change being a serious concern, artists who care about environmental issues are thriving with hundreds of artists working around the world, and with many female artists participating in the movement in particular.
Bettina Werner is one of the artists concerned with the local and global environment and reminds us of the dangers of climate change and needs our participation to protect the planet from the climate change.
