DESSA : entre Lausanne et Berlin
Deborah Sharon Abeles
Espace Louve
From November 19, 2026 to January 14, 2027
Opening night on November 19 at 6pm
The Musée Artistes Femmes presents a look at the rich and singular international career of the artist DESSA, a pseudonym formed from the initials of her name, Deborah Sharon Abeles.
For several decades, her work has unfolded across cultures, disciplines and territories, with Lausanne and Berlin standing as two essential poles of her creative practice. Born in 1948 in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia, DESSA has built a deeply personal body of work, nourished by her experiences, her travels and an insatiable curiosity about the world.
Today, she divides her time between her studio in La Conversion, near Lausanne, and Berlin, a city whose energy, history and artistic richness have accompanied a significant part of her journey. Between these two places, two atmospheres and two ways of inhabiting the world, her work continues to evolve, free and forever in the making.
For DESSA, art is at once intimate exploration and openness to others. Through it, she questions her identity, memory and history, and music, as well as the forms of a reimagined natural world. Her curiosity draws her to sometimes forgotten destinies, bringing overlooked lives to light and transforming research into artistic material. "In this way," she says, "art can also serve as a stimulating pedagogical tool." Abstraction and figuration, painting and collage meet in a body of work where colour plays a fundamental role.
DESSA asserts the necessity of constantly reinventing herself: each painting becomes a metamorphosis, a circulation of energy, a form calling forth another. This drive to break down boundaries between disciplines finds a particularly original expression in her invention, "Transoundart": an improvised dialogue between her paintbrush and the music of one or two musicians, created live during performances. Developed following her collaboration with Vaudois composer Dominique Gesseney-Rappo, this practice turns painting into a living experience, where gesture, sound and colour respond to one another in the moment.
From Bulawayo to Lausanne, from Berlin to the many horizons that have marked her career, DESSA has never stopped bringing together rather than separating: cultures, memories, disciplines, beings and forms. This idea of coming together forms the quiet yet powerful thread running through her entire artistic life.
Multicultural, well-travelled, a researcher and profoundly free, DESSA thus composes a body of work in her own image: plural, ever-shifting, made of fragments that together form a singular constellation. A body of work illuminated by the monograph published by Infolio, bearing a title imagined by Françoise Jaunin that captures her perfectly: DESSA: FEMME MOSAÏQUE (roughly, "DESSA: Mosaic Woman").