Caroline Bachmann

Meyer Riegger is pleased to present the solo exhibition Le Rhin with a new series on the river Rhine by the Swiss painter Caroline Bachmann.

By beginning their tour of the exhibition on the first floor of the gallery and making their way down to the ground floor, visitors can follow the course of the river from Reichenau to Rotterdam. Together, the 24 paintings create a portrait of the river from different perspectives. As if looking through the porthole of a ship, a telescope or a keyhole, Bachmann presents her depictions of the Rhine in round frames.

During two trips along the Rhine, Bachmann produced around 100 sketches; she then selected 24 and transformed them into paintings in her studio in Cully. While landscape painters such as Ferdinand Hodler and Giovanni Segantini always painted en plein air, namely in the open air, Bachmann prefers to retreat to her ‘cave’, as she refers to her studio. This separation from the original experience of nature – working in artificial light without a direct view of the landscape – is essential for Bachmann’s painting process, which is very slow.

This way of working means that her paintings are characterised by different experiences of time: the swiftness of sketching gives way to the more laborious painting phase, during which the artist slowly resurrects the spontaneous encounter with nature that she experienced while sketching. Bachmann’s paintings thus enable us viewers to experience time differently. Contrary to its usual linear course, the 24-hour cycle of a day, she creates temporal connections in her works that are not chronological. She explains: “When it works, it’s as if the painting were suddenly dilating space and time and inviting us, as we stand face to face with it, to be part of all those times at the same time.”