Bettina Müller aka BettyMü

Visual artist (BBK Munich and Upper Bavaria E.V.)

Photo: KuschelPhotography

Betty Mü was born and raised in Munich-Schwabing. In 1995 she moved to New York, where she worked as an art director and attended New York University and the School of Visual Arts. At the same time she experimented with Super-8 cameras and projectors and gained her first experiences with video art and live visuals.

After 6 years Betty Mü returned to Munich to expand her skills as a live visualist and designer. She advanced to one of the most famous VJs and worked in the hottest clubs, where she heated up the scene with her live videos. She went on tour with artists like Richard Bartz and was soon ennobled as the “princess of flickering synergies”, as in the announcements of the Munich Kammerspiele.

In 2011, Betty Mü exhibited her “Salon of Diversity” at the Munich City Museum (Nachtmuseum) as well as at the Kunstverein (Kunstarkaden), a work inspired by 19th century salon painting. Quotations, classics, and self-produced pieces, finely coordinated, captivated the viewer.

In 2013, the artist presented her first interactive room installation under the title “Wings“: the viewer stood opposite his projected mirror image, in which wings unfolded in neon colors. 

Thousands of enthusiastic guests celebrated the 150th birthday of the Gärtnerplatz Theater in the fall of 2015. Real façade climbers were integrated as the highlight, merging with the video animations and forming the number 150 in the grand finale. Three years earlier, Betty Mü had already performed on the facade of the theater as part of the Klassik OpenAir Festival.

For several years, Betty Mü was a regular at ArtMuc, a contemporary art fair on Munich’s Praterinsel. In 2014, she made a splash there with the umbrella collage Parapluie, followed by Replex horizontal (2015), Vortex, Dots and Moving Stairs (2016), Infinity Cube and Flowing #8 (2017), and Bliss (2018). In fall 2019, Betty Mü curated her own digital exhibition in an off-location with ARTMUC DIGITAL.LAB. Supported by artist Yul Zeser, over 15 artists occupied a total area of 1,000 square meters in “The Hub” with interactive art, mapping and light installations – the largest and most comprehensive digital art exhibition in Munich to date.

In parallel to her freelance work, Betty Mü designed mappings and immersive video installations for companies such as BMW Mini (2013/14), Absolut (2014), SAP (2015/17), Trivago (at AIDA 2017), Audi (2017), Lodenfrey (2017), and Mercedes AMG (2018), and was also present at trade fairs and events such as Medientage München (2017), Inhorgenta (2018 and 2019), Baselworld (2019), and the DLD Conference (2019 and 2021).

The LED installation Aesthetic Beast #2, conceived in 2017, was first exhibited at the Harry Klein Club and later at art25 at the Botanikum Munich. With the abstract 3D sculpture made of wood and Plexiglas, which spread into space like a titanic Archaeopteryx, the artist combined the latest video and LED technology, video mapping and rhythmic choreography. 

In spring 2019, Betty Mü delivered a spectacular live performance with her urban skyscraper mapping at Schwabinger Tor (Munich).

Photo: Florian Holzherr

In her largest project to date, the task was to stage the Munich Kunstareal between Königsplatz and Pinakotheken in the winter of 2020/21. At the center of her concept “The Kunstareal Connects“, selected by a jury of experts, was the work “Inside | Out,” in which Betty Mü abstracted exhibits from the museums and rearranged them with great feeling. In addition, light and video installations invited visitors to take a stroll and illuminated the Kunstareal with its eighteen museums and exhibition spaces, universities and a multitude of cultural institutions. 

In autumn 2022, she was also the only German artist to inspire thousands of visitors at the Leipzig Light Festival. With an oversized walk-in kaleidoscope, she recalled the Monday demonstrations of 1989 – and at the same time called for civil courage in today’s world. One year later, her work could be admired at the Berlin “Festival of Lights” with a central mapping on a 5-star hotel in Berlin.

Betty Mü has long been considered one of the most outstanding artists in the field of video art and live visualization and, despite her Munich background, is now known far beyond the borders of Germany. Currently, for example, with performances in other European countries, America and Africa.

As a former New York art director and sought-after club visualist, the label of female avant-garde and “ladypunk” was attached to her early on, which originally characterized her well, but today falls short. Works such as Vortex exude a meditative calm, immersive exhibitions such as “Comic Hive” focus on new ways of conveying scientific knowledge, and with her initiative “VideoArt4Future” (“The Container Project“ and „Egosphere“) she reflects on the difficult relationship between man and nature. Like hardly anyone else in digital art, Betty Mü is a border crosser. Sometimes she enchants, sometimes she challenges, always she surprises.

What her works have in common is the eye-catching aesthetics and the light-handed handling of the three-dimensionality of the objects she plays with. Front projection, rear projection, everything is used, often even simultaneously. Her installations like to question the point of view, in terms of content as well as visual, and draw the viewer into a maelstrom of impressions and emotions. There is no way to escape the hypnotic effect of her installations.

Betty Mü lives in Munich and Anzing and has two children.