Founded in 2012 in Geneva, Galerie Sébastien Bertrand mostly represents young and emerging international artists, but also works with more established ones. Since its beginning the gallery was committed mainly to new figurative practices. The exhibition schedule includes on average four solo shows of gallery artists as well as one curated show per year.
The majority of represented artists had their first solo or European solo exhibition at the gallery. Functioning as an incubator of sorts for their practice, and then serving as a springboard, we work towards their growth and support their collaboration with renowned institutions.
In order to promote our artists’ body of work outside Switzerland, we collaborate on a regular basis with curators, museums and with other galleries.
https://www.artageneve.com/article/tali-lennox
https://www.artageneve.com/article/sang-woo-kim-la-galerie-sebastien-bertrand
Exposition
Per Monstra Ad Sphaeram - Solo Show
Sébastien Bertrand is pleased to present Per Monstra Ad Sphaeram, a solo exhibition introducing Mathis Gasser’s (Zurich, 1984) work for the first time at the gallery. This show complements the presentation held simultaneously at Artgenève.
The title ‘Per Monstra Ad Sphaeram’ (Through Monsters to the Sphere) captures the essence of art historian Aby Warburg's work. It suggests that the path from the monstrous ("monstra") to the order of the cosmos ("sphaeram") is achieved through the secularization and recontextualization of ancient motifs.
The exhibition presents seven paintings, most depicting spaceships and part of an ongoing, loose series with such flying or hovering objects. Needless to say - Gasser has a deep fascination with spaceships. They represent many things. They mean many things. They may be a projection of abstract ideas in this world.
In a text on Gasser’s work, Mortiz Schepper wrote: ‘The seemingly innocuous veneers of Gasser’s paintings seethe and function as much like chimaeras as the ships themselves: The exterior always trumpets itself with ornamental design, which serves as both a distraction from and a clue to the monstrosities behind the surface. Gasser has written of ships as a potential expression of something hidden in the collective unconscious. The ships manifest and represent complex technology and engineering. Immobile, they appear like silent events of shapes with mysterious implications in the sky and on the painting.
