Valentine E. Bossert is a Swiss-born visual artist with a background in philosophy and archaeology, currently based in Berlin. She specialises in drawing, sculpture, and printmaking. She predominantly works with graphite and ink on paper, as well as found materials—mediums that allow her to translate concepts into objects straightforwardly and precisely with a nostalgic and modernist aesthetic.

Starting from the immediate environment or her recollection of a specific spatial context, she focuses on the interface that exists between human beings and the surrounding world. She endeavours to create a critical archive of these encounters, particularly in sites where human meaning is immanent to the material support. For example, she has worked with the historic remains of a Roman amphitheatre in Switzerland, ancient quarries in Italy, and a former factory in Berlin. Instead of falling for their symbolic significance, she is interested in what time has transformed, what is missing and deteriorating. For her, these clues mirror a fundamental, fleeting aspect of human existence that is indescribable through language.

In the dematerialised and information-saturated postmodern society, where truths are no longer absolute, she prefers a direct, analogue, and tangible approach to reality. Her work is guided by an experimental methodology: she repeatedly describes, measures, copies, reproduces, and records her environment using methods that are often simple and inspired by archaeology—such as rubbing—in order to make matter speak for itself.

In this approach, she positions herself as an interpreter of the physical environment and a curator of what emerges spontaneously and independently from her interventions. As a result, she creates works that appear fragile and fleeting despite their durability, original yet replicable, faithful yet distinct from the original, akin to memory or DNA. Through contact and reproduction, she reveals distance, but each piece also embodies a longing for reconciliation.

Through this archive of traces, she invites the viewer to engage with their own paradoxical relation to the world and themselves: inside nature but removed from it; bound to the present but carrying history; alive but impermanent; struggling but privileged; independent but part of society; an individual but an offspring; self but other. What lies in the gap is theirs to freely decipher.