GERALDINE BELMONT
Geraldine Belmont (b. 1977, New York) is a Swiss-American artist based in Basel, working across photography, collage, watercolour and fibre. She graduated with honours from ECAL, Lausanne, in 2001. Her work has been shown at MAMCO and In Vitro in Geneva, the MAK Vienna, SculptureCenter New York, Fri-Art Fribourg, Patrick Heide Gallery in Berlin and London, Museum Rietberg Zurich, and Carbon Fourteen Gallery, Théoule-sur-Mer. Most recently it appeared in Through Every Glitch and Eruption (2025), Greensboro, Alabama, alongside Thornton Dial and Purvis Young. She is represented by Post-American Fine Arts.
By Seaside Lane, 2026
Plastics and wool on stretchers.
In 1784 Benjamin Franklin wrote to his daughter that he wished the bald eagle had never been chosen to represent the new republic. He thought it "a Bird of bad moral Character": lazy and thieving, a creature that robs the fishing hawk of its catch. He would have preferred the turkey. Early in her career, Geraldine Belmont put Franklin's complaint on display at In Vitro, the vitrine space in Geneva directed by the artist Gianni Motti. At MAMCO, Geneva, she presented The Jolly Good Fellow Club, a work built around the campaign imagery of George W. Bush, born to royalty and chosen by God. Both were a New Yorker reading her own country's self-portrait from across the Atlantic, very calmly.
Belmont (b. 1977, New York) holds Swiss and American citizenship, and so is permitted to be rude about both. She studied at ECAL in Lausanne. Liam Gillick included her in Dedalic Convention at the MAK Vienna in 2001. SculptureCenter showed her in New York in 2006. By then she was already elsewhere.
Elsewhere was Bahia, Brazil. In the surf town of Itacaré, which produced up to 300 tons of rubbish a day in high season, she co-founded the NGO Yonic and ran a zero-waste program that employed 500 people over three years. With Yonic she also began replanting a hectare of mangrove in 2005, giving it room to grow and helping protect the island from erosion. In the years that followed she helped waste pickers form legal cooperatives and taught recycling in local schools. In 2013, with the artist Fabian Marti, she founded twoHOTEL, an artist residency on the same land, a way of protecting what had been planted eight years before.
Her work has always set opposites side by side and refused to referee: collage against commodity, the modernist glass facade against the vine creeping up it, American iconography against the people who live outside it. Gillick, who has written on her practice twice, describes an artist who gives the same care to the structure and to the thing growing over it. That patience is unfashionable. It is also the point.
Tokyo marks Belmont's first presentation in Asia and the start of her representation by Post-American Fine Arts, which continues into 2027 with new work to be announced.
Geraldine Belmont
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b. 1977, New York. Swiss and US citizen. Lives and works in Basel, Switzerland.
Geraldine Belmont was born in New York and grew up between two cultures, educated in Geneva and Lausanne. That double position, inside America and outside it at once, has shaped her work from the beginning. She graduated with honours from ECAL in 2001 and that year was included in Liam Gillick's Dedalic Convention at the MAK Vienna. In Geneva she showed at In Vitro, the vitrine space directed by the artist Gianni Motti, and presented The Jolly Good Fellow Club at MAMCO, a quietly pointed reading of American power and its self-image. Exhibitions followed at Fri-Art Fribourg, the Rencontres d'Arles, Patrick Heide Gallery in Berlin and London, and SculptureCenter in New York.
In 2004 she moved to Bahia, Brazil, where her practice extended into environmental work. In the coastal town of Itacaré she co-founded the NGO Yonic and led Lixomania, a zero-waste program that employed 500 people over three years and received an award from ABES, Brazil’s sanitation and environmental association, in 2006. With Yonic she began reforesting a hectare of mangrove in 2005, helping protect the island from erosion. Across the region she went on to help waste pickers form legal cooperatives, teach environmental education in local schools, and co-found TARTARÚ to protect the region’s sea turtles. In 2013, with the Swiss artist Fabian Marti, she established twoHOTEL, an artist residency on the same land, partly as a way to protect the mangrove planted eight years earlier. The residency has hosted 18 artists and led to 10 exhibitions, including one at Museum Rietberg in Zurich.
Back in Switzerland, Belmont has continued to exhibit internationally. Recent exhibitions include the solo presentations With Great Pleasure Comes Great Responsibility at Carbon Fourteen Gallery, Théoule-sur-Mer (2019) and Family Sadness in Brussels (2024), and Through Every Glitch and Eruption in Greensboro, Alabama (2025), where her work was shown alongside Thornton Dial and Purvis Young. Liam Gillick has written about her work twice, for Growth and Form (2017) and With Great Pleasure Comes Great Responsibility (2019).
Belmont works across photography, collage, watercolour and fibre. Her subject has stayed constant: the systems we build, what grows over them, and what gets left behind. She speaks French, English, German and Portuguese, and is based in Basel. She is represented by Post-American Fine Arts from 2026.
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1997–2001: Bachelor of Fine Arts (with honours), ECAL École cantonale d'art de Lausanne, Switzerland
1991–1995: Fine Arts Baccalaureate (with honours), Collège Claparède, Geneva -
2024: Family Sadness, Atelier Neess Encadrement, Brussels
2019: With Great Pleasure Comes Great Responsibility, Carbon Fourteen Gallery, Théoule-sur-Mer, France
2016: MUT, Adonias Filho Library, Ilhéus, Bahia, Brazil
2003: Wargasm, In Vitro, Geneva
2002–2003: The Jolly Good Fellow Club, MAMCO Musée d'art moderne et contemporain, Geneva
2002–2003: Berlin Photography, Patrick Heide Gallery, Berlin and London -
2026: Washed Up, Paid Off and Nobody’s Clean, and/or Some Things Look Better in the Shower, Tokyo Jazz Club, Post-American Fine Arts, Tokyo
2025: Through Every Glitch and Eruption, 505 College Street, Greensboro, Alabama, curated by Hyphae Collaborative Network
2017: Growth and Form, Septième Étage, Geneva
2014: twoHOTEL, Gastspiel im Museum Rietberg, Zurich
2006: Denial is a River, SculptureCenter, New York
2001: Dedalic Convention, by Liam Gillick and Annette Kosak, MAK Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna
2001: Hétérogène, Festival Off, Rencontres d'Arles, France
2000: Préfiguration du Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson, Collection JRP, Fri-Art Centre d'art contemporain, Fribourg -
2013–present: Co-founder, twoHOTEL artist residency with Fabian Marti, Piracanga, Bahia (18 artists, 10 exhibitions, 1 hectare of mangrove reforested)
2016: Co-founder, TARTARÚ Association, sea turtle habitat protection, Piracanga, Bahia
2004–2007: Co-founder and President, Yonic NGO. Led Lixomania, a zero-waste program for a community of 20,000 in Itacaré, Bahia, employing 500 people over three years -
2006: Award, ABES (Brazilian sanitation and environmental association), for the Lixomania program
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Liam Gillick, With Great Pleasure Comes Great Responsibility, 2019
Liam Gillick, Growth and Form, 2017 -
Gazette ProLiteris, No. 2, 2003
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2008–2015: Talks on art, ecology and sustainability at the University of Geneva, Corner College Zurich, The Salton Supper Club London, Gstaad Yacht Club, and others
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