Featured image: Heart in Hand, Bettina Homann, 2025, ceramics, 3 x 2.5 in. / 7.62 x 6.35 cm.
Bettina Homann’s latest paper mâché works combine whimsy, collage, and surreal figuration to create playful yet unsettling objects.
Bettina Homann creates playful, surreal paper mâché sculptures that blend collage, humor, and unease to explore the tension between whimsy and darkness.
Each sculpture balances humor with discomfort, transforming everyday materials into characters that feel alive. With vibrant textures, cut-out fragments, and cartoon-like features, Homann invites viewers to reconsider how absurdity, fear, and invitation coexist in art.
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Oh My, Bettina Homann, 2025, collaged paper mâché, 4 x 4 x 2 in. / 10.16 x 10.16 x 5.08 cm.
Oh My (2025) uses painted details, collage, and text to create a wide-eyed figure that seems caught mid-exclamation. The phrase “Oh my: Oh yes, Oh my yes” adds a humorous, theatrical tone, while its bright pink and green surface recalls both children’s crafts and grotesque masks. The result is a sculpture that is equal parts funny and strange, charming and uncanny.
Blackie, Bettina Homann, 2025, paper mâché, 4 x 2 x 2 in. / 10.16 x 5.08 x 5.08 cm.
Blackie (2025) introduces a darker mood. Rendered in stark black-and-white contrasts with bug imagery, jagged teeth, and cut-out figures, this piece resembles a surreal monster caught in the middle of transformation. Where Oh My leans into comic absurdity, Blackie leans into unease, tapping into archetypes of fear, shadow, and the grotesque.
We Invite You, Bettina Homann, 2025, collaged paper mâché, 4 x 4 x 2 in. / 10.16 x 10.16 x 5.08 cm.
We Invite You (2025) brings the themes of humor and horror together through collage. The colorful scraps layered onto the form, logos, floral patterns, and text fragments, turn the sculpture into a strange messenger. The phrase “We invite you” feels welcoming but also oddly foreboding, leaving the viewer unsure if the invitation is to a celebration, a ritual, or something stranger still.
Taken together, Homann’s 2025 sculptures transform paper mâché into a surreal stage of personalities, each oscillating between humor and discomfort. Through collage, painted features, and playful text, she creates characters that ask viewers to question the line between joy and unease. These works prove that even the most humble materials can embody wit, tension, and narrative depth.
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König Arsch von Zahn, Bettina Homann, 2025, ceramics and teeth, 2.5 x 2.5 in. / 6.35 x 6.35 cm.
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