Born 1970 in Lausanne, Sophie Bouvier Ausländer studied from 1989 ( Ecole cantonale d'art de Lausanne, 1990 to 1992 École nationale supérieure d'arts visuels de La Cambre in Brussels, graduated at Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design in London and doctorate at the Slade School of Fine Art in 2019 ) to 2019.
Read MoreAn important part of her practice is related to architecture and is expressed in several public commissions (Centre cantonal des finances, Lausanne, 2011; gymnasium in Renens, 2016)."The map does not describe the world, it does". This is one of the central observations of the artist, whose works are a means of "making worlds" in order to better question the world as an univocal sculpture. Her name, Ausländer, which means "foreigner" in German, serves as a starting point for exploring the feeling of distance and strangeness in the world. Interested from the outset in the sculptural potential of painting, she made copies of 19th and 20th century landscapes in the Heritage series (2008-2009). Painted in acrylic on paper, they were then passed to the document shredder by the artist, who freely recomposes the fragments that have become abstract, transforming them into wall sculptures. The installation Bleen (2013-2014), a contraction of the words "blue" and "green", expresses the instability, even impossibility of categories according to the postulate of the American philosopher Nelson Goodman. The artist starts from this concept to create an immersive work, testing the notions of permanence and scale, and offering a geographical language with inverted colour codes and approximate typology. The resulting representation of the world is strangely familiar to us.
In 2016, the artist creates a huge sculpture made of cement and open-access art books, Manières de faire des mondes (Renens gymnasium). In 2019, a new version of this work, Ways of Worldmaking/Selfportrait, gives substance to the set of books that serve as sources for his thesis and document six years of research. This work is a mise en abyme of the worlds created, in words or images, by authors, artists and philosophers, which are all means to understand this supposed entity - the world - which in its sense only exists in a plural way.
The artist is represented in collections of the United States, Troy (MI), Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation for Art Collection; Lausanne, Fonds des arts plastiques de la Ville; Lausanne, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts; London, UCL Art Museum; Netherlands, Wassenaar, Caldic Collectie, Museum Voorlinden; Renens Gymnasium (Manières de faire des mondes, 2016).
She lives and works in Lausanne, Switzerland
