Joined the collection in 2023

Catherine
Gfeller

Catherine Gfeller is a Swiss artist born in Neuchâtel in 1966. She currently lives in Paris and in the South of France. Her primary means of expression are photography and video. She has exhibited her work worldwide.

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Sculpture depicting a woman with a suitcase in her hand, waiting. She is completely red.

"Elle est là" écrit en rouge sur des lettres géantes, à côté de la sculpture de Catherine Gfeller.

Oeuvre "La Gardienne du temps", de Catherine Gfeller, prise de face. Ses détails comme ses yeux, son sourire ou encore ses mains sont très visibles.

A body of work in motion, between worlds and perspectives

Catherine Gfeller is a Franco-Swiss artist who lives and works in Paris, Montpellier, and Switzerland.
In 1991, she obtained a Master’s degree in French Literature and Art History from the Universities of Neuchâtel and Lausanne. She began photographing in the 1980s, focusing on landscapes, and traveled to every continent to find her subjects. In 1995, she received a grant that allowed her to continue her research in New York, where she lived until 1999. For over thirty years, she has exhibited her work in numerous countries: Europe, South Africa, Latin America, the USA, Canada, Saudi Arabia, and Israel.

Catherine Gfeller has received many awards, including the HSBC Foundation Prize for Photography in 1999 in Paris and the French Ministry of Culture Prize in 2022.

Travel to distant lands, cities and crowds, uninhabited landscapes, and women in motion represent her source of inspiration. She reinterprets them by creating “multi-compositions” that offer us a subjective vision of our contemporary lives.

Catherine Gfeller

Gfeller

In her installation at Vullierens entitled The Guardian of Time, Catherine Gfeller pays homage to a forgotten woman, silenced by history, a vanished mother who was nonetheless the progenitor of a great lineage. The artist’s stays in China particularly fascinated her, and she became interested in evoking the image of the Chinese woman, both contemporary and timeless. In her work, Catherine Gfeller represents and reinvents the Chinese woman who was the mother of the son of the famous pioneering watchmaker Edouard Bovet-de-Chine (1797-1849), their son Edouard-Georges, born in Macau and who later lived in Switzerland. We know neither the identity of this woman nor her story, and it is on this enigma that Catherine Gfeller based her project. By blending historical facts and poetic invention, Catherine Gfeller brings this unknown woman to life – as if she had traveled through space and time.

Standing at the edge of the Vullierens park, between two trees, The Guardian of Time gazes at the horizon and reclaims her place, her connection to her lineage and her personal history. The double installation The Guardian of Time holds a special place in Catherine Gfeller’s work due to its size (5 meters) and its sculptural technique.
The presence of the phrase SHE IS HERE highlights the literary aspect of Catherine Gfeller’s work, always subtly present in her photographs and videos to express the thoughts of her protagonists or those of the artist herself, addressing the audience – as if in a wink.

Catherine Gfeller

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Catherine
Gfeller