LAKES AND CLOUDS
November 10 2022- December 15 2022
by appointment
Duane Thomas Gallery is proud to announce “Lakes and Clouds” a solo exhibition by Caroline Bachmann. The show will open on November 10th 2022 with a reception from 6 to 8 pm.
Caroline Bachmann was awarded the Meret Oppenheim Award in June 2022 in Basel, and this is her second solo show with the gallery.
The works made over the last year represent a continuation of a project she started in the early 2000’s and that began when she and her partner and collaborator Stefan Banz were conducting research on the sites where Marcel Duchamp found inspiration for his piece “Given.” The couple eventually moved to the town of Cully on the banks of Lake Geneva where they kept collaborating on various projects including the Kmd Centre d’Art Contemporain, a capsule sized museum with a full program of exhibitions.
Painting did not come as an obvious choice for Bachmann who may have been more inclined to work in a conceptual vein. She states in a recent interview with Yann Chateigne Tytelman: “ I was born in 1963
and I faced 20 years of discourse in a French-speaking culture telling me that painting was dead. (…) The context was a bit arid but that made it more interesting.”
Prone to insomnia Bachmann takes visual notes on Lake Geneva at dawn, a view offered through one of her windows in her studio. Painting Lake Geneva thus began as a process that defied categorization, she bluntly refuses the genre of landscape painting as a unique way to describe her work. The process is both driven by observation and mental and art-historical inspirations that cement over the course of painting as a hybrid composition. “There is a meteorological dimension in these paintings, in the sense that they
bring an external time and an internal time together.” She notes in her conversation with YCT. In speaking about the painted frames in her compositions, she describes having found the idea in the paintings of proto-surrealist Louis Michel Eilshemius, and resolved to use the device as it seemed to address “questions (she) was tackling in (her) work 25 years ago in relation to focus in photography:
one of the principles of optics is that the more you restrict the field of view, the larger it becomes. Making it pass through a keyhole -or a hole in a door for instance, to reference Duchamp Again – Amplifies perception. (…) The painting works as an optical device.”
Caroline Bachmann (born in Lausanne, 1963) lives and works in Berlin and Cully Switzerland. She was a professor and head of the Painting and Drawing Department at the Haute Ecole D’Art et Design, Geneva (HEAD) between 2007 and 2022. Between 2004 and 2014 she worked with the Swiss artist Stefan Banz. Together they set up the Kunsthalle Marcel Duchamp (KMD) in 2009. In 2013 she began researching the artists around Duchamp: her exploration of the more or less marginal painters who came within orbit of the dadaists led her to develop a new pictorial language of her own, She paints landscapes, portraits and still lifes, and well as historical paintings.
for more information contact: [email protected]