Douglas Mandry is a Swiss artist born in 1989 in Geneva, based in Zürich, Switzerland.
After a BA with honors in visual communication at ECAL, Lausanne, his work has been exhibited and published around Europe, including C/O Berlin, Kunsthaus Wien, Foam Museum Amsterdam, Plat(t)form15 in Fotomuseum Winterthur, Swiss Design Awards in Art Basel, and the Swiss Photo Award. He has been nominated three times for the Paul Huf Award in 2015, 2016 and 2019, as well as the Prix Pictet Commissions 2019. Finally, his latest body of work “Monuments” has won the Foam Talent Award and will be featured in the magazine issue, as well as the touring collective exhibition in Amsterdam, Berlin and Paris.
Douglas Mandry examines the aspects of the photographic medium being a mechanical recording of reality, in order to question our relationship to memory, technology and nature within the Anthropocene era. Experimenting with photographic techniques and sometimes self-invented processes, he uses the medium as a raw material, stretches it, reworks it according to selected processes, to reach a critical distance from the indexical qualities originally attributed to photography. By doing so, he aims at creating a new typology of objects, somewhere in—between two- and three- dimensionality, mixing images with non photographic material. As a result, his work is an attempt to raise questions regarding materiality and tangibility, in a world of permanent image- production.