Born 1998 in Cameroon, lives and works in Geneva.

Yann Stéphane Bisso’s practice approaches diasporic identity through a narrative principle of withdrawal. His images operate as symbolic propositions, engaging as much with what might exist as with what already does, while consistently offering only minimal information. Drawing on the pictorial tradition of landscape painting, Bisso constructs a dreamlike universe that oscillates between memory and imagination, occasionally inhabited by figures. Through his painterly gesture, he presents landscapes not in order to fix them in place, but rather to withdraw them from any definitive definition. What interests him is the work’s narrative power: its story rather than its discourse, what it tells rather than what it knows.
The apparent simplicity of these paintings conceals their complexity. The more self-evident the image appears, the more it conceals the multiplicity of worlds it holds within. This economy of visibility prompts a reflection on the construction of the individual and the interactions through which questions of hybridity and erasure unfold. By withdrawing his landscapes from the viewer’s grasp, Bisso displaces societal concerns beyond the authoritative logic of demonstration: his paintings confront us while looking elsewhere. They continually elude us, redefining their space and language beyond what we believe we know and what we are capable of possessing.

His work has been exhibited at Kunsthaus Glarus; Haus für Kunst Uri, Altdorf; Kunstmuseum, Luzern; Halle Nord, Geneva; Centre d’art contemporain, Geneva; One Gee in Fog, Geneva; Forde, Geneva; Hit, Geneva; Limbo, Geneva. He is the Laureate of the Simon I. Patiño Grant (2026), the Leenaards Foundation Grant (2025), the Kiefer Hablitzel Special Prize (2024) and the Helvetia Art Prize (2023). His works are part of several public and institutional collections, including the Swiss National Bank Collection, the Helvetia Art Collection, the Art Fund of the Municipality of Plan-les-Ouates, the Swiss Post Art Collection and the Cantonal Contemporary Art Fund of Geneva.