Autre lieu, Genève, 1200 Genève
Free
Swiss artist Bernard Garo presents Give us Back the Beauty at Galerie Renaissance, Geneva, from November 6, 2025 to February 6, 2026. A reflection on beauty and nature.
For over thirty years, Swiss artist Bernard Garo has been exploring the fragile dialogue between humanity and nature. Working between painting, photography, film and performance, he transforms raw materials - natural pigments, volcanic sands, sediments, even glacier water - into works that reveal time, erosion and the metamorphosis of the natural world.
Give Us Back the Beauty* invites visitors on a journey through glaciers, immense living archives of collective memory that have shaped landscapes and cultures. Once perceived as eternal, these giants of ice are now retreating at an alarming rate.
Garo responds to this transformation with painting, photography and film: he paints directly onto 19th-century Dufour maps, superimposes pigment washes on paper and photographs draped or fractured icefields. Each work records not only the disappearance of glaciers, but also the persistence of beauty in their mutation.
Internationally recognized for his environmental and interdisciplinary approach, Garo has exhibited in major museums in Europe and Asia, including the National Art Museum of China (Beijing), the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Pully and the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle de Genève, where his art-science residency (2023-2024) resulted in the publication Rendez-nous la beauté. His films, made with Marc Décosterd as the duo Black Shroud, have won numerous awards, including the Lion Artiviste de Venise (2022).
Several presentations of his work are scheduled in parallel with the exhibition, including a screening of the short film Torrential Lava (2025) at the Festival International du Film sur les Glaciers in Geneva in December, where it is shortlisted for an award, and its selection for the Earth Film Festival in Brazil. His photographic works are also featured in outdoor exhibitions in Bernex and Chamonix.
With Give Us Back the Beauty, Garo invites us to reflect, scientifically, sensitively and spiritually, on our environment and our responsibilities. His works remind us that what disappears from the landscape also fades from memory, and that beauty, once lost, must be constantly rediscovered.
Note: This text was translated by machine translation software and not by a human translator. It may contain translation errors.
Give Us Back the Beauty* invites visitors on a journey through glaciers, immense living archives of collective memory that have shaped landscapes and cultures. Once perceived as eternal, these giants of ice are now retreating at an alarming rate.
Garo responds to this transformation with painting, photography and film: he paints directly onto 19th-century Dufour maps, superimposes pigment washes on paper and photographs draped or fractured icefields. Each work records not only the disappearance of glaciers, but also the persistence of beauty in their mutation.
Internationally recognized for his environmental and interdisciplinary approach, Garo has exhibited in major museums in Europe and Asia, including the National Art Museum of China (Beijing), the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Pully and the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle de Genève, where his art-science residency (2023-2024) resulted in the publication Rendez-nous la beauté. His films, made with Marc Décosterd as the duo Black Shroud, have won numerous awards, including the Lion Artiviste de Venise (2022).
Several presentations of his work are scheduled in parallel with the exhibition, including a screening of the short film Torrential Lava (2025) at the Festival International du Film sur les Glaciers in Geneva in December, where it is shortlisted for an award, and its selection for the Earth Film Festival in Brazil. His photographic works are also featured in outdoor exhibitions in Bernex and Chamonix.
With Give Us Back the Beauty, Garo invites us to reflect, scientifically, sensitively and spiritually, on our environment and our responsibilities. His works remind us that what disappears from the landscape also fades from memory, and that beauty, once lost, must be constantly rediscovered.
Note: This text was translated by machine translation software and not by a human translator. It may contain translation errors.