About the work

Vanessa Billy is interested in the materiality of the world, not as external conditions but rather as constitutive of our bodies and all living entities. Variously incorporating waste products or disused industrial parts, as well as highly crafted self-made elements, her sculptural works collide the biological and the synthetic as manifestations of complex entanglements.
In ‘Snake Plant’ she explores the potential of watercolour to create both fluid and precise marks as a method to generate hybrid forms.

Date and country of birth

1978, CH

Career Highlights

Born 1978 in Geneva, Vanessa Billy studied at Chelsea College of Art and Cooper Union, NY and currently lives and works in Zürich.
Selected exhibitions and commissions: La Matrice, EPFL, Lausanne (2023); Time Spirals with Emma McNally, Large Glass (2022), London; We Become, Kunsthaus Biel (2021); Redevenir, Villa Bernasconi, Geneva (2021). Group shows: Oil. Beauty and Horror in the Petrol Age, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, DE,’Swiss Sculpture 1945 to today, Kunsthaus Aarau, CH (both 2021); WE HYBRIDS!, Istituto Swizzero, Roma, IT (2020).
Public collections include: Centre national des Arts Plastiques (CNAP), Paris; Migros Museum, Zürich, the Swiss Federal Collection, Bern.