Simone Holliger

Simone Holliger was born in Aarau, Switzerland (1986) and she lives and works in Basel.

In 2014, the artist graduated from HEAD – Genève. Monumental works with paper have formed the core of Simone Holliger’s artistic practice for several years. Basing her research on lines and forms from urban areas and everyday life, the artist develops towering monochrome sculptures made of paper, which claim the exhibition space for themselves. Mostly arranged in seemingly human groupings, the amorphous structures form an abstract conceptual space for the interplay between the objects as well as for interpersonal relationships and the artist’s relationship to her own artistic practice to unfold. Despite their first appearance, the volumes, most of which remain close to the bas-relief, are often scrawny. Similar to shells, they are presented as moulds for future sculptures or fragmented remnants of a past performance. So, what initially looked like polystyrene or metal is soon revealed to be a collage. Simone Holliger thereby encourages a gymnastic of the eye that is constantly triggered to see the solid and the empty, the recto and the verso, the visible and the hidden. Furthermore, common size relations are disrupted and familiar material properties are put to the test: against the backdrop of a stereotypically male sculptural convention, Holliger’s sculptural position oscillates between awareness of tradition and formal rupture, vertical force and organic finesse.

Holliger won the Swiss Art Award in 2019 and completed residencies in Berlin (2020), at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (2016) and is currently a fellow of Istituto Svizzero in Rome. She has had solo exhibitions at Kunsthaus Baselland, Muttenz (2023); Musée des Beaux-Arts La Chaux-de-Fonds (2022); and La BF15 in Lyon (2022), among others. Together with other artists she has been running the off-space PALAZZINA in Basel since 2019, which focuses on the interweaving of living and exhibition space.