Beatrice Helg

Artist photographer, Beatrice Helg, is perhaps best known for her still-life photographic pieces that seem to interweave sculpture, painting, theatrical staging and light within transcendent pieces. Using industrial materials as the main focal point, Helg ‘stages’ thoroughly enigmatic, yet raw, compositions that respond to the viewer a sense of perceptival ambiguity. Concentrating on the otherwise neglected attributes of these such materials, the artist challenges prescribed notions of aesthetics and beauty, portraying to the viewer a scene of rusted metals, shattered glass and tarnished bronzes. Helg’s manipulation of geometries present the viewer a disillusioned state of imagery; through the perfect alternation of voids and falls, light and shadow and opacity and transparency.

Born in Geneva, Helg originally studied cello at the Geneva Music Conservatory before deciding to pursue a career in photography. In 1979, she took part in the organisation of Venezia ’79 where she came into contact with influential figures like Lisette Model and Robert Mapplethorpe, thus beginning to shape her own personal artistic style. Since then, she has exhibited at a range of influential establishments both in Europe and the United States, which include the Museum Tinguely in Basel, the Institut Valencia d’Art Modern, and the Recontres d’Arles, as well as the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University. Her work can also be found in the collections of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in Paris, the International Center of Photography in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. The artist currently lives and works in Geneva.