Current Exhibitions
Layers and Narrations
Therese Weber
8 – 31. October.2025
Artist Talk on Saturday, 25th. October from 2 – 3 PM
Therese Weber is one of the most important protagonists of Paper Art. As an artist and researcher, she has devoted herself to art, cultural history, and their related sciences and practices. From Paper Art to the exploration of prehistoric rock carvings and site-specific installations in the desert and mountainous regions of Asia and Arabia, Therese Weber’s artistic practice displays great methodological diversity. She combines paper art, photography, drawing, objects, and performance actions into an innovative visual language. It is always a new challenge to create expressive textures, surfaces and shapes from the liquid mass of cellulose fibre and combine them with different concepts. Only in the rarest of cases does the artist use paper as a background. She primarily works with various raw materials from nature, constantly experimenting and developing new paper fibre materials, creating sculptural installations for indoor and outdoor spaces, and exploring the landscape to create fleeting and unbounded sculptures.
Growing up in Switzerland and studying in San Francisco in the early nineteen-eighties, when Paper Art First emerged, she dedicated her life’s work to this artistic practice, researching the culture of paper around the world. Her work has evolved steadily and consistently since her first experiments in abstract Paper Art – from multi-layered objects to painting with liquid cellulose pulp. Her exploration of the qualities and structures of dyed pulp has resulted in increasingly complex entities. Over the years, both the fibres and the colours used have multiplied; the interplay between two-dimensional paper fibre layers and three-dimensional object has become wilder and bolder; new elements, such as photography, drawing, and frottage have been added, the latter in the context of her research project on petroglyphs; and the paper sculptures have begun to extend outdoors, into the vastness of open, barren yet mystical landscapes, with increasing frequency. Her work and art language over the last forty years span the entire arc of her lively oeuvre, with its fascinating expression, persistence, and transformation all occurring simultaneously. Weber also values the material for its cultural associations. This applies to both the works created in her studio and the numerous works that have appeared on expeditions, excursions, and projects. Working with paper and photography – both in art and research – took her abroad very early on. She began her research trips in the USA. Since then, she has spent many months working and exploring mainly in Asian countries.
Therese Weber is Professor Emerita at the University of Applied Science (FHNW), Basel, Switzerland. Regular lecture cycles at universities and art institutes, as a visiting professor and artist-in-residence, took her to Japan, Argentina, and the University of Canberra in Australia (1996), among other places. From 1992 to 1996, she served as president of the International Association of Hand Papermakers and Paper Artists (IAPMA).
She has been awarded art prizes on the occasion of the 9th International Biennale of Paper Art, Leopold Hoesch Museum in Düren, Germany (2005) and the Japan Paper Academy Award, Museum of Contemporary Art in Imadate, Japan (1995). Her works are represented in numerous national and
international exhibitions, museums, public institutions, private collections, and art-in-architecture.
Weber’s book ‘The Language of Paper – A History of 2000 Years’ (2007) has become a standard reference work. Two major monographs (2017 and 2023) document the artist’s work. Her latest book, ‘RockArt and its Legacy in Myth and Art‘, was published, together with Christoph Baumer, at Bloomsbury London in 2025.
Therese Weber lives and works in Switzerland.
Photos by Michelle Bowden