Laura Zimmermann - visual artist
- Jan 26
- 4 min read
Laura Zimmermann, raw intimacy: between tenderness and violence
According to her grandmother's diary, Laura had already decided at seven that she would be an artist. This childhood promise, formulated as self-evident, took deep root in her. A Parisian, she studied at the National School of Decorative Arts, in the Fashion Design section. But despite the beauty of materials and the rigor of drawing, fashion did not fulfill her. She realized that her true terrain of expression lay elsewhere: in painting, that first love she had never betrayed.
From early on, Laura paints what she lives. At eighteen, her series Party People explores celebration and its excesses. She lays the canvas on the floor, pours her acrylic with spontaneity, and lets the material react freely. Painting becomes movement, pulsation, experimental ground. The artist doesn't title her works: she prefers to create open contexts where the public projects its own narratives.
But behind this freedom of gesture hides an acute awareness of the world. The series Ordinary Violence, inspired by photographs of children holding weapons, questions how violence infiltrates education, words, gestures. Laura paints there the fragility of childhood confronted with the absurd, with fear. Gradually, the weapon disappears from the composition, replaced by a white stain: a void, a silence, a space to fill. This pictorial gesture, both aesthetic and symbolic, invites the public to reflect on what they project there: fear, guilt, responsibility.
In When the Horizon Barely Whitens, created during the years of the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan attacks, the question of censorship and freedom of expression asserts itself forcefully. The artist wonders: should she anticipate the public's reaction, self-censor? She then remembers Gilles Deleuze's words: "The painter doesn't have to fill a white surface, he must rather empty it." This is how she conceives The Void, a pivotal work where she attempts to bring forth light from chaos.
This violence of the world, Laura doesn't deny it, but transforms it. She softens it without sugar-coating it. Her series Love (2016) appears as a breath after the storm. Gestures become lighter there, forms more fluid, drawings more sensual. Love is plural there, sometimes tender, sometimes brutal because sexuality, she says, can also carry within it a part of violence. She denounces how, even today, a woman artist dealing with these subjects is judged or misinterpreted. In response, she claims freedom of body and gaze.
The birth of her son, Salaï, marks a new era. For lack of "a room of one's own," painting pauses for a time, but drawing takes over. Salaï becomes a foundational series: quick, intimate sketches, drawn in the urgency of daily life. She captures there the moving face of her child, the exhausting beauty of motherhood, this fusion that sometimes borders on self-dissolution. Then comes Parasite, where she represents first her son then her daughter at the breast, literally grafted to her body. In these works created in situ, motherhood is not idealized: it is instinctive, ambivalent, organic. Breastfeeding, still taboo in public space, becomes an act of resistance and unconditional love. Laura reveals there the double face of motherhood, between gift and loss, tenderness and enslavement.
This exploration of the mother-child bond extends to a broader reflection on the human condition: the duality between birth and death, vulnerability and power, tenderness and tension. Laura speaks of her series as "life journals," visual archives of her own journey. Through drawing, the repetitive and comforting gesture, she finds a form of therapy. Repetition becomes a ritual, a breath, a means to remember, to soothe, to continue.
In her practice, the notion of contrast is omnipresent. It expresses itself as much in bright colors as in the themes addressed. The softness of the line confronts the harshness of the subject. She uses colored pencils, tools of childhood, to deal with war, loss, fear. This contrast creates powerful visual and emotional tension: innocence and brutality coexist on the same surface. The addition of embroidery, legacy of her training in Fashion Design, comes to soften these tensions. Thread, symbol of care and domesticity, connects her different practices—sewing, painting, drawing—in a dialogue where the tool becomes the subject.
In her series Eyes Closed, Laura goes even further. She evokes children throughout the world: those who grow up in the cocoon of peaceful Switzerland, and those who, elsewhere, face horror. The gentleness of the gaze is tinged with awareness. She asks us to accept seeing what we prefer to ignore. From this awareness is born Love (2023), a candid response to chaos. The artist here borders on abstraction, as if light could finally take over from pain.
Today, Laura pursues her research with maturity and freedom. Her painting and drawing are no longer just forms of expression, but spaces of existence. She mingles there the political and the intimate, the collective and the personal. Her work, deeply anchored in reality, testifies to our humanity in tension, this ambivalence between tenderness and violence, between cry and silence.
Laura paints the world with the heart of a mother, the eyes of a child, and the lucidity of a woman. Her work, inhabited, vibrant, invites us to look differently at what we silence, and to love, despite everything, what remains fragile and alive.
Dr. Marie Bagi
Director of the Musée Artistes Femmes (MAF)
Published November 4, 2025
