Collection: Linus Bill

Linus Bill (born 1982, Biel/Bienne) is a Swiss artist working across painting, publication, and printed matter. Trained at the École cantonale d'art de Lausanne (ECAL), Bill has developed a practice in which the printed page and the painted canvas exist in continuous dialogue — each informing, preceding, and surviving the other.

Bill is best known for his long-running collaboration with Adrien Horni, through which the two artists developed the Gemälde project: a process of drawing, cutting, scanning, and exchanging images that were first gathered into Xeroxed publications before being translated into large-scale acrylic and silkscreen paintings. The page was never merely preparatory — canvases from the sequence retain titles such as Gemälde, p. 53, preserving the printed model from which they emerged.

Publications by Linus Bill occupy a precise position within his practice: they are not documentation of work made elsewhere, but objects in which the work first takes form. Catalogues, artist books, and exhibition publications produced in small editions record the image at the stage before enlargement, colour, and transfer to canvas — making the printed matter an early and irreducible part of the finished sequence.