SOPHIE BOUVIER AUSLÄNDER

Sophie Bouvier Ausländer (*1970, Lausanne, Switzerland) is a Swiss artist known for her multidimensional approach to space, form, and knowledge. Her practice weaves together painting, sculpture, drawing, and installation into works that question how we construct, inhabit, and perceive the world. Drawing from cartography, architecture, and literature, Bouvier Ausländer’s pieces often blur the boundary between object and concept, surface and structure. Her work is deeply informed by research and theory, yet remains grounded in a tactile and visual language.

A graduate of Central Saint Martins in London and La Cambre in Brussels, Bouvier Ausländer earned her PhD at the Slade School of Fine Art (UCL) in 2019. There, she developed large-scale sculptural installations that double as self-portraits, composed of research materials, books, and spatial frameworks. Notably, Ways of Worldmaking/Self-Portrait (2019) reflects on the porous relationship between personal history and institutional space, engaging viewers in a participatory exploration of knowledge and identity.

Her 2016 public commission Manières de faire des mondes—a concrete wall embedded with openings for books—merged architecture and library, embedding epistemology into physical form. In Mare Vostrum (2019), shown at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Le Locle, she used tangled rolls of barbed wire to create a monumental yet vulnerable sculpture that commented on borders and migration. Most recently, URSINAE (2022), a permanent glass installation outside the BäreTower in Bern, transformed star charts into colored light patterns, inviting reflection on orientation, movement, and myth.

Bouvier Ausländer’s work has been exhibited widely in Switzerland, the UK, France, and beyond, including solo and group shows at institutions such as the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, the Musée des Beaux-Arts Le Locle, and international galleries in London and Brussels. Her pieces are held in significant collections including UCL Art Museum (London), Museum Voorlinden (Netherlands), and the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation (USA).

Her art resists categorization—often deliberately unfinished or dependent on external elements—and embraces the idea that meaning is co-produced by context, viewer, and time. Through minimal yet charged gestures, Sophie Bouvier Ausländer crafts artworks that are both visually compelling and conceptually expansive, continuously interrogating how we locate ourselves—physically, mentally, and culturally—in the world.