Renate Buser
The city’s urban and architectural fabric are the subject and basis of Renate Buser’s photographs. For her installations, the artist, who lives and works in Basel, finds inspiration in existing architectural elements from which she constructs huge imaginary spaces, often in black and white. She wanders through the streets of the world’s cities in order to experience space and to record its different architectures.
Buser trained at the Schule für Gestaltung in Basel, as well as at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice between 1984 and 1988. Since 1997, she has focused on large-scale installations usually placed in public spaces, favouring a monumental format. The work by this Basel-based artist has travelled far beyond Switzerland’s borders. In particular, it has covered a facade of the Sun Trust building in Miami Beach with the Tower Piece (2006-2008) project.
In July 2014, the artist filled the
Bellelay Abbey in the Bernese Jura
with her Barock project, composed of
eight photographs. The dialogue that
she establishes with vernacular
architecture testifies to the great
complicity she maintains with the
places she occupies. By juxtaposing,
through photography, points of view,
and by multiplying perspectives, the
artist contributes to making our
experience of architecture more
complex and dense, between
strangeness and closeness,
authenticity and fiction, interior
and exterior.
