Carola Bürgi


Carola Bürgi

Born 1967 in Switzerland, lives and works in Switzerland

Represented by the Galerie La Ligne since 2017

Works from Carola Bürgi


Games of Light

In the workshop by artist Carmen Perrin in the Geneva School of Fine Arts (1996-1999), Carola Bürgi was impressed by the phenomena of perception. In this context, the artist began to experiment with different translucent materials, like material and paper membranes, and various plastic alimentary films. Carola Bürgi has thus been able to create very light objects with a central empty space instead of a filled volume. The translucent quality of the materials, allow multiple games of light and space; these are the games, which the artists has intensely explored since then, allowing her to feel the experience in various ways. Carola Bürgi describes what has fascinated her about the translucent aspect of the materials: “The experience of the translucent and blurry does not allow us to clearly and quickly recognise what we see. The spectator’s gaze oscillates, searches, becomes active, perhaps doubting, because it can not name with clarity. All this perturbs our habit of quickly classifying what we see.”


Dissolving borders

Translucent material, in its interaction with light, fractures material limitations and equally breaks with the order and dimensions of a closed body. In this, it stimulates a different vision of sculpture, that of a temporal fragment, as an ephemeral and changing apparition. All of Carola Bürgi’s work plays with this concept of sculpture. The artist does not consider it as a closed and impermeable object, but as a creation in a constant state of transformation. In the “jetzt.Skulptur heute” exhibition (Kunsthaus de Langenthal, Switzerland, 2004), what was in play was knowing whether the object, the sculptural body, was important for contemporary sculptural creation. Carola Bürgi’s objects arise as a pertinent and extremely stimulating response. Owing to their material quality, they oscillate at the edge of the limits between the body and its dissolution, between the border of the object and and its dissipation. Her objects, liberated from preconceived ideas, open the gaze and allow the corporal experience of an elementary and sensual encounter with the sculpture.


Painter and visual artist

Carola Bürgi defines herself as a painter and visual artist. After an art research course in installation and sculpture, she completed her post-graduate studies in painting at the Geneva School of Fine Arts. Her strong affinity for painting endows her work with a powerful pictorial element. The artist, however, does not value one media over the others, but plays with the alternatives between installation, sculpture and painting. For the “Fluid Artcanal International” exhibition (2006-2007, Le Landeron: Switzerland , Daejeon: South Korea, Berlin-Germany), she presented a work of this type (En même temps/gleichzeitig). On top of a raft, a mirror was installed horizontally so that the water occasionally ran over the reflecting surface. Reflected briefly in the mirror, the water and sky intervened as participatory elements of the installation creating changes of perception. The mirror in it-self is not longer clearly visible under the water, even becoming visually distorted. This allows a representation of the simultaneousness of the object and its image, which at the same time transforms the work in a metaphoric aesthetic of the ties between installation, sculpture and painting.

Extract of a text of Kathrin Frauenfelder, Art Historian, Zürich Switzerland


Public collections (Selection)

Ville de Sursee (CH)

Centre funéraire de Nyon (CH)

Ville de Nyon (CH)

Studio OPP, Prilly (CH)

www.edition5.org/ Kunstsammlung Erstfeld (CH)

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