Caroline Bachmann: 2022 laureate of Switzerland's Prix Meret Oppenheim for art

Caroline Bachmann is one of Switzerland's foremost contemporary artists. Alongside her independent work in painting and drawing, she has also formed one half of the artist duo Bachmann Banz, together with Stefan Banz (1961-2021), from 2004 to 2014. Together, the two founded the Kunsthalle Marcel Duchamp-The Forestay Museum of Art in Cully, Switzerland, in 2009. In 2013, Bachmann reinvented herself as an artist and turned to classical themes of painting. She engages deeply with the genres of portraiture, still life, and history painting and takes up existential questions of the metaphysical and the sacred, creating compositions that strive not for a materialistic grasp of reality, but for a depiction of the spiritual dimension of existence.

This first comprehensive and richly illustrated monograph traces Caroline Bachmann's extraordinary journey through the medium of painting. The essay by Paul Bernard, curator at MAMCO, Museum of contemporary art of Geneva, as well as a conversation with the editor Julie Enckell and the artist, reveal a creative self-discovery that is shaped by the ideals of artistic idols such as Marcel Duchamp, Louis Michel Eilshemius, and Arthur Dove, and set in motion by the courage to reinvent herself through subject, technique, and material.

"At the right time, the book appears, as if to confirm the importance of this French-speaking artist-painter. To highlight the extremely structured system to which she backs her work, and that she began to develop in 2013." Rinny Gremaud, Le Temps