Catherine Bolle Swiss, b. 1956

Works
Biography
View works. Catherine Bolle, Alphabet-Alphabeth ou Soleil au Nord [3], 2008
Alphabet-Alphabeth ou Soleil au Nord [3], 2008
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Catherine Bolle (b. 1956, Switzerland) pursued a dual scientific and artistic education. She first trained as a physics laboratory technician at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), then as a chemical engineering technician at the Technicum in Geneva, before studying at the École des beaux-arts of Sion (1976–1978).
 
In the early 1980s, Bolle became actively involved in photography and printmaking. From 1981 to 2000, she collaborated with Raymond Meyer’s printmaking workshop in Pully and, in 1984, co-founded a photography studio with Matthias Thomann. That same year, she founded Éditions Traces and has since produced more than one hundred artist’s books, a central aspect of her practice.
 
Since the 1990s, Catherine Bolle has been collaborating with architects and integrating her works to public spaces. These site-specific interventions explore the intersections between art and architecture, considering art as tied to spatial configurations and territories, rather than isolated objects.
 
Bolle’s practice is fundamentally interdisciplinary, encompassing drawing, painting, photography, film, tempera, engraving, installation, and publishing. Through sustained dialogue and collaboration with other creators—visual artists, writers, architects—as well as with scientific researchers, her work has been enriched by diverse perspectives, resulting in a multiplicity of forms and themes.
 
Nature is a driving force in Bolle's work. She incorporates mineral and vegetal elements, inspired by natural processes such as variation and metamorphosis. Water, essential to all life forms, is a recurring motif, often evoked through glass, whose transparency and material qualities reflect fluidity and impermanence.
 
Her fascination with contemporary poetry and literature also permeates her practice, which integrates text and calligraphic elements, blurring the boundaries between visual art and poetry. A recurring thread throughout her work is the notion of trace—natural or human—left upon the world, a concept that finds particular resonance in engraving, where meaning emerges through the interplay of emptiness and fullness, presence and absence, black and white.
 
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Exhibitions
Installation shots
Press