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 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.