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.