Barbara Cardinale
“Barbara Cardinale explores the thousand and one facets of a woman by decorating or satirizing them with zoomorphic characteristics. Fawn, she-wolf, eagle, rabbit-femininity is adorned with tenderness, malice, or even claws, creating a recurring iconography. The transferred image loses its realism to become a shadow, something ethereal, even surreal because the animals are integrated within the human bodies so freely. The hybrid nature of the image is done so subtly it is difficult to detect which is stronger, the human or the animal. We shift from character into metaphor... a natural outcome of this poetic union.”
Text by Nicole Kunz, Art Historian and Director of the Centre d’Art la Villa Bernasconi and the Ferme de la Chapelle Gallery in Lancy.
Swiss artist Barbara Cardinale, born in 1980 is living and working in Lausanne. She graduated with honors from ECAV (Cantonal School of Arts - Valais) with a Master of Arts in Public Spheres. She received a degree in visual arts, also with honors, from Geneva’s Haute Ecole d’Art et de Design (Geneva School of Art and Design). Barbara Cardinale spent six months on an exchange program at the Ecole nationale des beaux-arts (National Academy of Fine Arts) in Paris. She has published art books with several publishers in Switzerland and in France. She has exhibited numerous times in Switzerland, but also in Nantes (France) and in Amsterdam. In 2011, she was awarded the Action FLAC prize from the Fondation Lausannoise d’art contemporain (Lausanne Foundation for Contemporary Art). She has been an active member of the Visarte Association since 2012.
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