‘She slept in the hallway on a lawn chair’: how Bettina’s astonishing art outgrew her Chelsea Hotel room

The reclusive figure spent decades filling every surface of her apartment at the legendary New York hotel with artworks that rose in teetering piles. Some are now on display for the first time in Glasgow When the artist Yto Barrada stepped through the door of room 503, up on the fifth floor of New York’s Chelsea Hotel, she was overwhelmed by what she saw. Every inch of the walls was plastered with Xeroxed word art, graphic reproductions of geometric sculptures, hundreds of photographs of pass...

By Lillian Wilkie