Vues du ciel
Updated: 2 days ago
Florence Friedrich
Espace Berger
19 November to 14 January 2027
Opening on 19 November at 6pm
With Vues du ciel (Views from the Sky), Florence Friedrich opens the doors to her world, built through work on glass plates. Sea charts, small islands with an imaginary geography, visions of the sky crossed by delicate nebulae: her gaze carries us into a utopian space, halfway between earth and sky.
Through these meticulous compositions, the artist questions our relationship to the world and the place we occupy within it. She invites us to step back, from ourselves as much as from the world, to dream once again of a green, blue and peaceful earth.
Demanding in its own right, glass painting answers the artist's doubts and hopes with its transparency and fragility. Florence Friedrich has worked exclusively on this medium since 2022, blending ink, gouache, acrylic and oil pastels. Each plate, which a careless gesture could shatter, carries this delicacy within it and reminds us that all life is fragile.
Biography
Florence Friedrich lives and works in Lausanne. A graduate in art history from the University of Lausanne as well as from ECAL, she worked for many years in the museum world while continuing to create.
From 2021, her health forced her to redefine the contours of her life, and she now devotes herself to her work on glass plates. Alongside this, she runs a creative expression workshop in Lausanne (atelierlatrace.ch).
Her artistic world initially draws on medical imagery, echoing the observation of the infinitely small — cells, tissue, as seen under a microscope slide. Then, conversely, the artist seeks out the infinitely large, observed from the sky. The plates grow larger and become vast, imagined geographical maps. Little by little, the transparency of the glass plate reappears in her work, drawing closer to stained glass and carrying the viewer halfway between sky and earth.
Florence has previously exhibited in Lutry (Galerie du Voisinand), at the Ôse Thérapies space in Lausanne, and at the CHUV.
In the artist's words
"Head in the clouds or eyes fixed on the ground, stars or grains of sand: do you choose to turn your gaze upward or downward?
And what if you placed yourself in the middle... exactly halfway between sky and earth, what would you see? You would see, for sure, Vues du ciel, above and below you.
Settled halfway between your planet and the vault of the heavens, nocturnal sea charts would unfold before your eyes, sometimes with your mother surfacing in them to reassure you, or small islands of shifting geography. Then, when you raised your head toward the immensity that looms over you without ever swallowing you up, an avalanche of stars, nebulae and clouds would carry you off on the wind.
From up there, still, you would blink and an earth once again green and blue, at peace, would appear before you. Nestled in your cloud, you would regain your childlike gaze and marvel once more at everything around you: the stars in motion above you, the endless dunes and the tides below you."
Florence Friedrich
November 2026
