About

Julian Charrière, a Swiss-French artist based in Berlin, engages with the cultural and environmental histories embedded within natural landscapes. His works collapse geological and human timescales, revealing the slow and often invisible forces that shape and reshape both terrains and historical imaginaries. Spanning film, sculpture, photography, and installation, his multidisciplinary practice is marked by immersive projects grounded in fieldwork within ecologically and symbolically charged sites—glaciers, volcanoes, nuclear test zones, and deep-sea ecosystems. Through these intimate encounters with fragile environments, Charrière explores how human activity inscribes itself into the fabric of the planet, subtly altering its surfaces, atmospheres, and futures. Fusing scientific observation with speculative poetics, his works foreground landscapes as physical processes, repositories of memory, and vessels of cultural imagination. Rather than illustrating environmental crises directly, Charrière creates spaces where wonder and disquiet coexist, allowing viewers to experience the contradictions and tensions of our contemporary condition. His practice probes the colonial and extractivist legacies embedded within acts of exploration, landscape representation, and the technologies of seeing.

Charrière graduated from the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) and was a participant in Olafur Eliasson’s Institute for Spatial Experiments. His works of art have been widely exhibited internationally, with solo exhibitions at Museum Tinguely, Switzerland, ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art, Denmark, Palais de Tokyo, France, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, United States, Dallas Museum of Art, United States, Langen Foundation, Germany, Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (MAMbo), Italy, Aargauer Kunsthaus, Switzerland, Berlinische Galerie, Germany, and Parasol Unit, United Kingdom, among other art venues. His work has also been presented at the Centre Pompidou, France, Fondation Beyeler, Switzerland, and Mori Art Museum, Japan, among multiple Venice Biennales. Charrière is the first recipient of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Environment and Art Prize awarded in 2024 by The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles.