Sara Gassmann (born 1980 in Dagmersellen, Switzerland) pursues a painting practice shaped by an attentive engagement with color and form. Her works emerge through translucent layers in which luminous shapes intersect, merge, and gradually transform. These processes unfold on canvas as well as in ceramic works, where scale, surface, and material conditions actively influence the development of the image. Painting is approached as an open field of negotiation, guided by intuition and perceptual responsiveness rather than fixed intentions.
Organic references frequently initiate her compositions. Shapes resembling bodies or body parts, especially those of animals, appear without resolving into stable forms. These multicolored, translucent elements overlap to create images with an ethereal and permeable quality. In her more recent works, interior spaces and still-life motifs come into focus, populated by tables, vases, ladders, and containers that interact within the pictorial field, taking on an almost performative presence. These corporeal and architectural motifs remain deliberately ambiguous, hovering between recognition and uncertainty, abstraction and figuration.
Materiality plays a central role in this process. Canvases and the rough, resistant surfaces of ceramic works actively shape compositional decisions, with the support functioning as a responsive partner rather than a neutral base. Driven by curiosity and experimentation, Gassmann's approach maintains a sense of play and openness. Through abstraction, her images resist fixed origins and invite attentive, repeated looking.
Gassmann's compositions carry an almost dreamlike quality and resist fixed dramaturgy. Rather than unfolding as structured narratives, they open onto layered, oneiric spaces in which images drift, overlap, and reappear. Symbolic elements operate as immanent presences that guide perception without becoming illustrative.
During an Atelier Mondial residency in Bali, the artist began exploring shadow puppetry. She learned techniques of shadow play and integrated them into her practice through a collaboration with sound artist Janiv Oron. This experience further deepened her interest in visibility, absence, and transformation.
Sara Gassmann lives and works between Bern and Basel. She completed her Bachelor's degree at HEAD Geneva and earned a Master's degree in Contemporary Art Practice at the Bern University of the Arts. Her work has been widely exhibited and supported by numerous residencies and distinctions, including the Jury Prize of the Central Swiss Cantons at the Kunstmuseum Luzern and a work grant from the Canton and City of Lucerne. She has participated in international artist residencies at the St. Moritz Art Academy, Residency Unlimited in New York, the Swatch Art Peace Hotel in Shanghai, Art Space Geumcheon in Seoul, and the Inside-Out Art Museum in Beijing.
Her works are held in public and private collections such as the Canton of Lucerne Cultural Promotion Collection, the Christoph Merian Foundation in Basel, the Kunstkredit Basel, the Hirslanden Clinic Art Collection in Lucerne, the Inselspital Art Collection in Bern, and the Inside-Out Art Museum Collection in Beijing.