James Bantone

James Bantone was born in Geneva, Switzerland (1992) and he currently lives and works between Geneva and Paris.

The artist graduated with a Bachelor of Art & Media – Video at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) in 2019 and completed the Work.Master – Contemporary Artistic Practices at the Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD) in 2021.

James Bantone’s practice moves across photography, sculpture, painting, and video, treating the image as a surface where desire, classification, and projection accumulate. Working with found and self-produced imagery, he is less interested in representation as likeness than in the conditions through which a subject becomes readable: how a surface is charged, misrecognized, circulated, and made available to fantasy, value, and consumption.

Through transfer, fragmentation, corrosion, and overpainting, Bantone interrupts the apparent coherence of the image. Photographs are displaced across supports such as steel and aluminium, strained through processes of reproduction, and made to behave less like windows than skins: handled, marked, unstable, and exposed. In recent works, Bantone turns this logic onto himself. His own body enters the work not as confession, but as material, a surface through which agency, objecthood, exposure, and control become difficult to separate.

His work begins from the condition of being looked at before one has fully appeared.

He has had solo exhibitions at Tunnel Tunnel, Lausanne (2026), Spazio Maiocchi, Milan (2024), Swiss Institute, New York (2024), Karma International, Zurich (2023), Coalmine, Winterthur (2020), and participated in group exhibitions at Kunstraum Niederösterreich, Vienna (2024), Kunsthalle Zurich (2023), Simian, Copenhagen (2023), Klemm’s Gallery, Berlin (2023), Espace Niemeyer, Paris (2023), Salts, Basel (2023), Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen (2023), Centre d’Art Contemporain de Genève (2022) Cordova, Barcelona (2021), Kunsthalle Fribourg (2020), and UV Estudios, Buenos Aires (2019).