Bernard Garo was born in Geneva in 1964. He studied art history, architecture and Egyptology at the University of Geneva, before continuing his studies at the Ecole d'Art de Lausanne (ECAL). He graduated with honours in 1989 and has won awards in painting, photography and xylography. Garo currently lives and works between Beijing (CN), Paris (F) and Nyon (CH), a picturesque Roman town on the shores of Lake Geneva that was founded by the emperor Julius Caesar over two thousand years ago.

Over the course of his career, his concepts have taken him between Paris, Barcelona and Berlin, and more recently between Beijing and Moscow. He has confronted other cultures and other places in order to develop a vision and artistic reflections linked to the human being and his impact on the environment, touching as much on memory, vulnerability and time. After his solo exhibition at the Musée Arlaud in Lausanne in 2017, he focused on sustainable development and the environment, creating series of works linked to erosion and alpine geology, which are part of his DNA. And for some years now, he has been preoccupied by the accelerated degradation of glaciers, which he has been able to observe and analyse, and whose shrinkage and consequences he has measured, being the first victims of climate disruption, to make them the main subject and artistic medium of his current multidisciplinary work.

Garo's work is mainly pictorial and materialist, but also cross-disciplinary, as he develops installations as well as a photographic and performative approach.


His work praises painting as much as it does our earth. He uses entirely natural materials that he finds on cliffs, in volcano craters and under glaciers. His canvases bring us face to face with the matter of our origins, with a physical and mineral impact that leaves no one indifferent. In this way, he opens up his painting to multiple, highly topical perceptions; at once emotional and technological, scientific and philosophical. Garo's work is as much a celebration of nature as it is of the fragility of human beings, because he always seeks to create cross-disciplinary links between his pictorial, photographic and video work and his installations.


Through his commitment, the artist stimulates thought by using multiple media. He conveys essential ideas with strong values, through a humanist and contemporary way of thinking, supported by a hypersensitive eye. His art is total and limitless.


He has more than a hundred exhibitions to his credit, in museums and galleries in Switzerland and abroad (Europe, Russia and China). His work can be found in private and public collections around the world.

A museum exhibition dedicated to him in 2017 at the Espace Arlaud (Lausanne), led by curator Camille Avellan, was a great success. The following year, he was invited to exhibit in the main hall of the National Museum of China, as part of the Beijing Biennale of Contemporary Art. From 2019 to 2021, he had a series of solo and duo exhibitions at the LV Lang Art Center in Nantong, the Guiyang Art Museum and the Kuanzhai Art Museum in Chengdu, culminating in the Shanghai 21 Contemporary Art Fair, and various projects in New York, Berlin, Venice, Aqua Art Miami and Switzerland. In 2023, for the 4th year running, the artist will represent Switzerland at the NordArt exhibition near Hamburg.

For years, his work has been devoted to social and mainly environmental issues, and he won the first ARTIVIST LION Grand Prize in Venice for his manifesto film Crevasse, released in 2022 and co-directed with Marc Décosterd. This recognition was awarded by 3 gallery owners in Berlin, New York and Paris, and led to him being invited to take up an art and science residency at the Geneva Museum between 2022 and 2023.

The artist duo, united under the Black shroud collective, have co-created several video art installations as well as 4 art house films and poetic documentaries in less than a year, some of which have won international awards and nominations at environmental and mountain film festivals. Crevasse won the prize for best experimental film at the 2022 Berlin International Art Film Festival. It was also honoured with the title of Best Cinematography in Norway and Second Best Short Film in Argentina, as well as being nominated at numerous other festivals, including FIFAD 2022 (Festival International du Film Alpin des Diablerets).
The performative short film 1000 years under the ice was nominated at the FIFAD in 2023. So to find oneself at the same major festival two years running with a new work dealing with the same theme, but developed from a different angle, highlights the artist's commitment to glaciers.
The topicality of their approach has been successfully confirmed with their second performance film Plus pour longtemps, which was also selected for the Festival international du Film sur les Glaciers de Genève 2023, and with their latest short film Tabula Rasa, which won a prize for best eco-documentary at the Bridge of Peace Festival in Paris 2023, in addition to other prestigious awards.

Numerous articles, thematic works and catalogues bear witness to this masterful cross-disciplinary work, including two 500-page reference monographs in several languages.

He has also won numerous awards and produced major works integrated into architecture and public spaces.