May 12, 2025 (Positano, Italy) – Based at Le Sirenuse, the iconic family-run luxury hotel in the Italian coast town of Positano, the Artists at Le Sirenuse program is delighted to present its latest hotel-specific art project: a cycle of twenty seascapes by Swiss artist Caroline Bachmann inspired by the view of the Li Galli islands from the famed Amalfi Coast hotel over the course of an imaginary day, from midnight to midnight.
Bachmann lives on the shores of Lake Geneva. A core element of her practice is to observe the lake at all hours, especially the liminal time between day and night, making sketches that, in her studio, become painted canvases that hold within them a multiplicity of views, memories and moments.
Antonio Sersale, co-owner of Le Sirenuse, fell in love with Bachmann’s work when he caught one of her solo shows at the Galerie Gregor Staiger in Zürich. He was struck by the convergence between her Lake Geneva waterscapes and a view he has admired since he was a child: that of the Mediterranean sea with the Li Galli islands on the horizon, as seen from the rooms, restaurant, bars and terraces of the hotel his family founded in 1951 in what until then had been their seaside villa. Siblings Paolo, Aldo, Anna and Franco Sersale named their new venture after these three islands, which were once known as Le Sirenuse, or ‘The Sirens’, due to their association with the mythological creatures who tempted passing sailors with their irresistible voices.
Invited to Positano in October 2023 by Antonio Sersale and Artists at Le Sirenuse curator Silka Rittson Thomas, Bachmann became equally fascinated by a view that changes from second to second under the influence of light, wind, waves and weather.
It was when she and Gregor Staiger stepped into Le Sirenuse’s Don’t Worry Music Bar, housed in what had been one of the original living rooms of the Sersale family villa, that the artist realised she had found a home, and a subject, for the proposed work. Up there, just below the traditional cross-vaulted ceiling, were twenty arched niches running continuously around the walls. This was the perfect location, Bachmann remarks, for a series of works that chart twenty moments in the course of one day and night but “are to be read in a direction of an infinitely rotating clock”.
Choosing as her ‘observation tower’ Room 65, which enjoys an unparalleled panorama of the ‘vertical town’ of Positano and the sea beyond with the Li Galli islands on the horizon, Bachmann began, as she always does, to make a series of pencil sketches of anything that struck her about that view – effects of the light, cloud formations, wave patterns, colour shifts and other details. It was only later that winter, after she returned to her Swiss studio, that the artist decided that the islands should be the focal point of the landscape cycle, and also the works would be a series of tondos – a circular format that was popular with Italian artists of the Renaissance.
It took Bachmann nine months to complete the twenty oil paintings, each of which measures 30cm in diameter and is enclosed within a painted amber frame based on a traditional Italian earth pigment, burnt sienna. The artist referenced the preparatory drawings made in Positano, she explains, “as a musician does a musical score… I don’t turn to the sketches to remind me of something but to recognise a density, an emotion, a force”. Bachmann adds that, for her, painting an island “is like painting a self-portrait, not only because the artist’s profession is a kind of island, but also because an identification takes place in the act of painting an island that allows you to bring it inside yourself and see it as a subject that is completely internal”.
Entitled Le Sirenuse I–XX, 2025, the twenty works were installed in the Don’t Worry Music Bar on 8 April 2025, starting with midnight in the centre of the north wall, and proceeding clockwise around the arched niches through the course of a day and back to midnight. They encircle an existing work that hangs from the ceiling of the same room – Martin Creed’s neon installation Don’t Worry (2016).
The dialogue between each work and its setting and the conversation between the individual works is a defining element of Artists at Le Sirenuse, a site-specific art programme launched in 2015. To date, it consists of twelve commissions, among them Nicolas Party’s vibrant re-imagining of Le Sirenuse’s swimming pool and Alex Israel’s trompe l’oeil mural on the stairway leading down to Aldo’s bar.
MEDIA CONTACT:
A R T Communication + Brand Consultancy (Berlin)
Anna Rosa Thomae | Founder | art@annarosathomae.com
NOTES TO EDITORS:
About Le Sirenuse
Le Sirenuse opened in 1951, in what until then had been the Sersale family’s summer house in Positano. Today, the 58-room Amalfi Coast resort is considered an Italian hospitality icon, though it still retains the intimate, cultured atmosphere of a private home. More than a mere hotel, it has become over the years a lifestyle reference point that brings into fertile dialogue the worlds of fashion, culture, gastronomy, mixology, and wellbeing, creating connections and crafting personal narratives.
Scenic La Sponda restaurant, informally glamorous bar-bistrot Aldo’s, and the resort’s chic little Pool Bar showcase this southern Italian region’s authentic seasonal produce, while the Don’t Worry Music Bar is a true insiders’ speakeasy in tune with the rhythm of Positano nights.
Le Sirenuse also features a refreshingly contemporary Spa designed by architect Gae Aulenti, where a range of signature treatments are available, alongside a fitness area with two total-workout Megaformer machines. The resort is celebrated worldwide for its all-inclusive weekly activities, which include trekking on some of the Amalfi Coast’s spectacular mountain trails and more leisurely sunset cruises on the Sant’Antonio, the family’s traditional gozzo fishing boat.
Assembled over decades by art and antique collector Franco Sersale, the hotel’s elegant décor today enters into conversation with a growing site-specific contemporary art collection featuring talents of the calibre of Martin Creed and Nicolas Party, while the light-filled bedrooms are havens of dolce vita style. Now, as in the past, Le Sirenuse is a family affair. Third-generation Sersales, Aldo and Francesco, are increasingly involved in the day-to-day running of a hotel that their parents, Antonio and Carla, began to manage in 1991. Carla currently curates Emporio Sirenuse, the resort wear and lifestyle brand she founded in 2013, which takes inspiration from the deep-rooted Mediterranean culture of this charmed enclave south of Naples. For more information, please visit Sirenuse.it/en.
For more information, please visit www.sirenuse.it/en
Facebook | Instagram | @lesirenuse
About Caroline Bachmann
After studying at the Academy of Arts and Crafts in Geneva, Caroline Bachmann went on to live and work in Barcelona and Rome before returning to Switzerland in 2003, where she is currently based. From 2007 to 2022, she is a Professor and Head of the painting and drawing department at the University of Art, HEAD in Geneva. Her and Swiss artist Stefan Banz collaborated between 2004 and 2014, a period during which they founded KMD – Kunsthalle Marcel Duchamp | the Forestay Museum of Art, an exhibition and research space. Caroline Bachmann lives and works between Cully and Berlin.
Image Credits:
1 -2. Caroline Bachmann, Le Sirenuse I–XX,2024-5. Oil on board, 20 parts. 30 x 30 x 2.2 cm each BACH/P 71. Photography: Galerie Gregor Staiger © Caroline Bachmann.
3. Caroline Bachmann in the Don’t Worry Music Bar at Le Sirenuse. 2025. Photography by Roberto Salomone.
4. Le Sirenuse, Don't Worry Music Bar, 2025. Photography by Brechenmacher & Baumann.