Catherine Gfeller was born in 1966 in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. She currently lives and works in Paris and Southern France after having lived in New York from 1995 to 1999. After her Master in Fine Arts in 1991 at the Universities of Neuchâtel and Lausanne, she devotes herself to photography. She travels to many different continents (Europe, Africa, Asia, South America, North America) to create large triptychs on landscape (“A Matter of Landscape”). In 1995, she receives a grant for a one-year residency in New York. There, she develops a printing technique which combines paper, monoprint and photography on the theme of urban landscape ("Urban Friezes").
In 1999 she is invited for a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and receives the Photography Award from the HSBC Foundation. Paris inspires a new work (“Multi-Compositions”), focused on metaphorical urban subjects using various media: video, sound and the written word. Intimate spaces and daily gestures create new multi-layered compositions where urban rhythms still resonate (“The Insiders”, “Chimeras”, “Domestic Pieces”, “Waders”).
In 2010-2012 her monographic exhibition "Pulsations" is hosted by Museum of Fine Arts La Chaux-de-Fonds, Museum of Fine Arts KKL Luzern and Center of contemporary arts Sète. In 2013 she directed the movie "Words of Artists/Portraits of Artists", a documentary film (87 Min.) on 12 Swiss contemporary artists, produced by Richard Dindo and Swiss Television RTS Zürich.
Catherine Gfeller has exhibited extensively in Switzerland, France, Italy, England, Holland, Germany, Belgium, Argentina, Chile, Canada and the United States. Her work has been added to private and public collections in Switzerland, France, England, Italy, Germany, Japan, Belgium and the United States. She regularly takes part in art fairs, such as ArtBasel, Kunst Zurich, Armory Show, la Fiac, Ljubjana Biennale and Art Bruxelles.
Shimmering images, inverted worlds: is the city moving or the viewer and - if both - who is quicker, more authentic, more fleeting? Catherine Gfeller’s photographic and video work, based on incessantly pulsating urban landscapes, is autobiographical insofar as it focuses on New York and Paris, but it is hardly private. Everything here is public, yet nothing can really be captured. In other groups of works, the artist takes a thoroughly different look at the symbiotic relationship between mankind and the environment, peering behind the anonymous façades of buildings and exposing intimate living spaces. Speed, exhileration and indulgence: "The only form of stability can be found in being ‘lulled by the loop’, as if caught up in the unfathomable trance of repetition."
Catherine Gfeller incorporates people, buildings, bridges, windows, cars and every other ?xture of urban life into her photography. She walks through cities with her camera in hand, snapping pictures of architecture and pedestrians in their surroundings. There is a sense of immediacy to the images - a capturing of the photographer?s own sudden intrigue with certain, perhaps momentary, scenes,leaving little time for careful composition and positioning. Gfeller?s work truly emerges back in her studio where she chooses a single or numerous images which she duplicates, layers and arranges into linear, geometric compositions arranging, tweaking and adjusting every element. The fractured and repeated images create bold, rhythmic photographs that echo the lively cadences of the city. Single scenes that are repeated a dozen times in the same piece capture a ?eeting moment and become ruminations on the passage of time. Many of the photographs are populated with anonymous pedestrians, superimposed one over another, over another, like memories of previous moments layered over the present. In other works, transparent ?gures become one with their surrounding architecture. Catherine Gfeller does not just quietly observe and distantly photograph the places she visits. She is immersed in these cities and is moved by their colors, buildings, pace, light and vibrations. Gfeller?s montages suspend time and space, offering new versions of the realities she records with her camera.
