Caroline Bachmann's paintings owe as much to turn-of-last-century Symbolism—in their attempt to depict an infinite stillness, whose synthetic depiction of nature could be mistaken for that of eternity—as to plein air painting. The artist lives and works on the shore of Lake Geneva, where she spends hours contemplating the scenery, recording with a lead pencil on paper minute details of atmospheric events, making notes in the margins of subtle colour changes—not unlike comic book colourists of the pre-digital age, whose job it was to pass on to engravers written codes corresponding to the 64 possible combinations of percentages of cyan, magenta, yellow and black at their disposal. Back in the studio, the paintings are then built up over a lengthy period of time with translucent glazes of oil paint.
Caroline Bachmann (born 1963 in Lausanne) grew up in Cully, Switzerland. She studied at the Academy of Arts and Crafts in Geneva, and leaved to live and work in Barcelona during four years. She moved then to Rome for eleven years, and, from 1997 until 2000, she took part in the Oreste project. In 2003 she came back to Switzerland, and since 2007, she is a professor in charge of the painting and drawing department at the University of Art,
HEAD – Genève. She developed with
Stefan Banz an artistic collaboration between 2004 and 2014. Their work can be seen in the permanent collections of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Mamco, Geneva, and Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany. Since then they work again separately, but they still share together the
KMD – Kunsthalle Marcel Duchamp | the Forestay Museum of Art, which they founded in 2009.
