Amélie Ducommun France, b. 1983
Overview
Amélie Ducommun is a Franco-Swiss artist whose practice centres on memory, landscape, and the emotional resonance of natural elements. She graduated from the École des Arts Décoratifs de Paris (ENSAD) and the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona.
In 2009, Ducommun was selected by the Académie des Beaux-Arts to represent French painting in Spain for a two-year residency at the Casa de Velázquez. In 2011, she was invited by the Miró Foundation in Mallorca to work in Joan Miró’s summer studio, and she received the prestigious Georges Wildenstein Prize.
Nature has been at the heart of her practice, informing a visual language rooted in memory, the perception of landscape, and the interplay of elemental forces. A defining period in her career occurred on the island of Ouessant, where she spent a year living in near-immobility, observing the movement of the tides and producing the hundred-piece series Estran. This experience deepened her ongoing exploration of the “memory of water”, a theme that threads through subsequent series.
Her work has been guided by a desire to understand memory and to explore how landscapes imprint themselves upon us. She creates “memory maps”: nebulae of traces, sensations, and emotions gathered from the places she crosses. Her paintings and installations are not illustrations of reality, but accumulations of remembered impressions, layered transparently like the strata of experience.
In a world overwhelmed by speed, clarity, and constant opinion, Ducommun is drawn to the grey areas—those subtle, uncertain spaces where poetry still exists. Today, collective memory feels fragile; what connects us to the past is increasingly fleeting: a photograph, a message, a video that leaves no room for nuance or discussion. Ducommun’s process is an oscillation between the exterior world, which must remain new, and her interior world, filled with memories. The work emerges in the meeting of the two. Her paintings seek to express this interplay. Lines and colours do not fight but evolve in harmony; they form balanced encounters between elements essential to both life and memory.
At the age of 41, she has already exhibited in more than one hundred shows across Europe, North and South America, Asia, and the Middle East.
Works
