at Sean Kelly TEFAF New York 2026, Stand 330
Julian Charrière - TEFAF NY 2026
Julian Charrière
Head-Image
Julian Charrière
A Thousand Worlds, 2025
mirror made using silver reclaimed from gelatin silver prints
6 1/2 x 4 1/4 inches (16.5 x 10.8 cm)
unique
(JCh-229)
Provenance:
The artist and Sean Kelly, New York
Julian Charrière
A Thousand Worlds, 2025
mirror made using silver reclaimed from gelatin silver prints
6 1/2 x 4 1/4 inches (16.5 x 10.8 cm)
unique
(JCh-224)
Provenance:
The artist and Sean Kelly, New York.
A Thousand Worlds is a series of minimalist mirrors made from reclaimed silver, which was extracted from thousands of gelatin silver prints. Though they initially present as simple reflective surfaces, these works embody the hidden histories of photographic production, where silver halide crystals once captured and preserved light. By transforming this residue into mirrors, Charrière reveals the material economies that underpin image-making and their ties to broader cycles of resource extraction and consumption.
At the same time, the works remain intimate and psychological: as mirrors, they function as symbolic sites where identity is reframed, and as collective objects, they fuse countless dissolved memories into a single ambiguous reflection, simultaneously erasing and preserving history in a shared surface where the personal and collective converge.
Julian Charrière (b. 1987, lives and works in Berlin) is a Swiss-French artist whose work explores the cultural and environmental histories embedded in natural landscapes. Spanning film, sculpture, photography, and installation, his practice often involves fieldwork in ecologically and symbolically charged sites — glaciers, volcanoes, nuclear test zones, and deep-sea ecosystems—examining how human activity inscribes itself into the planet’s surfaces, atmospheres, and futures.
Fusing scientific observation with poetic speculation, Charrière creates immersive works where wonder and unease coexist, probing the colonial and extractivist legacies embedded in exploration, landscape representation, and technologies of seeing. Born in Morges, Switzerland in 1987, he graduated from the Berlin University of Arts (UdK) and participated in Olafur Eliasson’s Institut für Raumexperimente (Institute for Spatial Experiments). Charrière has exhibited his work internationally—both individually and as part of the Berlin-based collective Das Numen—at institutions including Museum Tinguely; Palais de Tokyo; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (MAMbo); MASI Lugano; the Parasol Unit Foundation for Art, London; the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne; the Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Kunsthalle Wien; Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna; the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; the Reykjavik Art Museum; the K11 Foundation, Shanghai; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, among others. His work has also been featured in major biennials, including the Kochi-Muziris Biennale; the 12th Biennale de Lyon; the 13th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice; the 57th Venice Biennale; the inaugural Toronto Biennial of Art; and the 14th Bienal de Artes Mediales de Santiago. Charrière was awarded the Kiefer Hablitzel / Swiss Art Award in 2013 and 2015, received the GASAG Art Prize in 2018, and was the recipient of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Environment and Art Prize at MOCA Los Angeles in 2024.