Mauren BrodbeckBorn in Geneva in 1974, Mauren Brodbeck has, since her youngest years, been delivering an eclectic and multicoloured body of work that calls into question ideas around "being" vs "appearing to be", working in a realm of expressive forms sublimated bycolour. At the tender age of 12 the artist took her first steps into the fascinating world of photography quickly discovering a passion for all and any of the arts: film, photography, screenplays, design, art directing, singing and composing, dance, writing, magic, fashion. With her heightened curiosity, these forms of expression combine to allow Mauren to explore the world and achieve her quest to define the place of humans in contemporary society and in relation to each other. At the heart of her work, certain recurring themes come and go, each a different take on the subject of identity: adolescence, self-portraits, architecture and urban landscapes. Mauren first trained in Visual Arts (painting and drawing) and then went on to work and study in the fields of cinematography, as a film director and producer of shorts films, documentaries and advertisements for which she won three prizes and participated in several festivals. Mauren graduated in photography and design from the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA and in cinematographic production from the Vancouver Film School. She currently works as a photographer and is represented by several galleries in Switzerland, France and Germany. Her initial training in painting and drawing enables Mauren to give an eclectic dimension to her work, the resulting projects have a pictorial and sculptural vision and composition. During course of a cosmopolitan trajectory that has opened doors for her at home and everywhere, the Swiss artist has fashioned a colourful and fascinating body of work that stands out from the rest through its sweetened pop colours, its radical tone and intensely bold side. She wrote: "My approach is based on appropriation, reconstruction and the simplification of reality. I work in parallel with photography and video by using different techniques such as collage, animation, superposition, erasing, colour application and time stretch. It is by lingering my glance on an element that can seem trivial at first, that I create and reconstitute an image or a video. The ordinary is disconcerting, all my works initiate from that angle. In my various series of work, video or photographic, I always investigate the way we perceive and create our reality and use memory to reconstruct it. They are essays on identity through the man-made creations, such as landscape, buildings, cinema and art." She wrote: "My approach is based on appropriation, reconstruction and the simplification of reality. I work in parallel with photography and video by using different techniques such as collage, animation, superposition, erasing, color application and time stretch. It is by lingering my glance on an element that can seem trivial at first, that I create and reconstitute an image or a video. The ordinary is disconcerting, all my works initiate from that angle. In my various series of work, video or photographic, I always investigate the way we perceive and create our reality and use memory to reconstruct it. They are essays on identity through the man-made creations, such as landscape, buildings, cinema and art." Read More Read Less