18/06/2026
Liste Art Fair Basel is open until Sunday! We are delighted to present a solo presentation of new paintings by French artist Clémentine Bruno (1994, FR).
Find us at Booth 85 until 21 June 2026
Liste Art Fair Basel
Messe Basel
Hall 1.1
At Liste, Bruno presents a new suite of paintings developed through a lengthy process of layering and burying images beneath successive layers of gesso – a mixture of calcium carbonate and animal-hide glue that dates back to ancient Egypt and later became central to medieval and Renaissance painting. Applied to oak panels sourced from an Italian manufacturer of religious icon boards, gesso functions as both surface and substance: oil paint is repeatedly deposited, sanded away, and reapplied in alternating cycles, generating a dense material history within each panel.
Through this technique, Bruno Bruno stages a continuous negotiation between figure and ground, appearance and disappearance. In her work, visible forms often seem on the verge of dissolving back into the material from which they arise. Universal emblems such as matchboxes and stars partially emerge from strata of gesso and pigment, yet remain tethered to the wood surface beneath. What becomes visible arises from an entropic blur rather than a definitive contour, prompting a meditation on the fundamental condition of objects and images: emergence, transformation, decay, and return. Bruno describes these compressed layers as a form of “painted geology,” where multiple temporalities coexist: the duration of her labour, the historical time absorbed from other paintings, and the excavatory gestures that reveal or conceal earlier decisions.
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Clémentine Bruno
TOTAL, 2024
Oil and traditional gesso on wooden panel
152 x 92 x 5 cm
59 7/8 x 36 1/4 x 2 in
Clémentine Bruno
Liste Art Fair Basel
