Yvonne Robert

Yvonne Robert was born in 1972 in Germany. After graduating in graphic design from the Basel School of Design in 1996, she worked as a freelance designer in Munich and Zurich before co-founding the design agency Büro4 in 1999, which she ran for twenty years. Since 2018 she has worked as a full-time painter. She lives and works in Zurich.

Her painting emerges from an intuitive, spontaneous engagement with colour and composition: quick gestures, dense matter, no external references or predetermined meanings. Her practice is grounded in the essential principles of colour, form, proportion, rhythm and structure.

A formative aspect of her visual perception is her synaesthesia: since childhood, names, numbers and sensory impressions have come with distinct chromatic associations. Her canvases function as visual mappings of these internalised colour perceptions, shaped by the moods and light of the world around her.

Artist in residence at Les Baux-de-Provence in 2023, she has taught since the same year at the F+F School of Art and Design in Zurich. Her work has been exhibited in Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles, Sydney, Berlin, Madrid, Barcelona and Zurich, and is held in private collections in the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Spain, Canada, France, Austria, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Germany and Switzerland.

Robert’s work intentionally refrains from engaging with socio-political rhetoric or overt conceptual frameworks. Rather, she offers a space in which viewers are invited to reflect inwardly and to arrive at their own interpretative positions. For her, clarity and understanding arise through personal perception — through the emotional and sensorial responses the paintings evoke.

She seeks to create works that generate energy, fostering a return to a more instinctual, pre-cognitive mode of experiencing. In this sense, her paintings serve as conduits to a natural state in which intuition supersedes knowledge.