Caroline Bachmann and Stefan Banz have designed a photographic and pictorial artist
's book which focuses on Berlin cemeteries. In a combination of
photography and
painting they consider the uniqueness of the park-like cemeteries in Berlin, which are used as leisure and recreational areas. Bachmann and Banz turn these places of melancholy and calm into an aesthetic experience by “making emotions visible”.
Stefan Banz (born in Sursee, lives and works in Switzerland) is an artist and author. In 1989 he cofounded the Kunsthalle Luzern and served as its artistic director until 1993; since then he has been working as a freelance artist, participating in solo and group exhibitions in international galleries and museums. From July 1994 to December 1997 he was the artistic consultant and curator of Galerie Hauser & Wirth. In 2000 he received the Manor Art Prize, and the Recognition Award from the City of Lucerne. From 2004 to 2014 he collaborated artistically with
Caroline Bachmann. In 2005 he was the curator for the Swiss Pavilion at the 51st Biennale in Venice. In 2009 he cofounded the association
, and in 2010 he co-organized the event “Marcel Duchamp and the Forestay Waterfall” in Cully, Switzerland, both with Caroline Bachmann. Since then he has been the artistic director of the KMD.
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.
