Acclaimed Swiss artist Bernard Garo has spent more than three decades exploring the fragile dialogue between humanity and nature. Working across painting, photography, film, and performance, he transforms raw materials—natural pigments, volcanic sands, sediments, and even glacier water—into artworks that reveal time, erosion, and transformation in nature.
Give Us Back the Beauty* invites visitors on a journey through glaciers, immense, living archives of memory that have shaped both landscapes and cultures. Once seemingly eternal, these frozen giants are now retreating at an accelerated pace.
Garo responds to this shifting landscape through painting, photography, and film, directly painting onto historic 19th-century Dufour maps, layering washes of pigment on paper, and photographing shrouded or fractured ice fields. Each of his works records not only the vanishing of glaciers but also the persistence of beauty in their transformation.
Internationally recognized for his environmental and interdisciplinary practice, Garo has exhibited in major museums across 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 2023–24 art-and-science residency culminated in the publication Rendez-nous la beauté. His films, created with Marc Décosterd under the duo Black Shroud, have received numerous awards, including the Artivist Lion de Venise (2022).
Coinciding with the exhibition are a series of new presentations of Garo’s work, including the screening of his short film Torrential Lava (2025) at the International Glacier Film Festival in Geneva this December, where it is nominated for a prize, and its selection at the Earth Film Festival in Brazil. His photographic works are also featured in outdoor exhibitions in Bernex and Chamonix.
In Give Us Back the Beauty*, Garo compels us to reflect, scientifically, sensorially, and spiritually, on our environment and our responsibility. His works remind us that what disappears from the landscape also fades from memory, and that beauty, once lost, must be continually rediscovered.