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LORI HERSBERGER​

The Swiss artist Lori Hersberger lives and works in Zurich. Born in Basel in 1964, he studied Video Art and Sculpture at the Basel School of Art and Design. At the beginning of the nineties he started creating environments and installations, initially combined with video, later with different kinds of media like mirror glass, painting with fluorescent paint, neon light, and chrome steel. He quickly devoted himself to a wide spectrum of different, seemingly incompatible media and subject matter. His works are characterized by a direct artistic language and, while many trigger a strong affirmative impression, subversive potential. In different installations, as well as in his painting and sculptures, he takes up a range of topics such as hybrid emotionalism and the twofold semantic nature of phenomena such as the phantom-like. Starting in 2000, Lori Hersberger extended his artistic work to abstract painting, and since then has viewed himself exclusively as a painter and sculptor. Calling him an installation artist is just as inadequate as categorizing him solely as a painter, for since the beginning of his career he has dedicated himself to a kind of perspectivism expressed in the experimental exploration of multiple genres. Lori Hersberger’s art stresses the opposition between the world of illusion and that of reality, yet at the same time alludes to the space between them. In this sense, his works are both sublime and grotesque – a combination that is also clearly expressed in his current exhibitions.

Lori Hersberger has received numerous awards, including the Swiss Art Award (1999 and 2000) and the Manor Art Prize Basel (2001). His works have been shown at many institutions and museums, among them the MAC Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon, where in 2008 he presented in his largest solo exhibition to date, titled Lori Hersberger - Phantom Studies, deformed steel sculptures as well as extensive installations with neon light and mirror glass, or in other solo shows at, among others, Kunsthaus Zürich in 2003. In addition, he has exhibited at venues such as Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel, the MMKK Museum for Modern Art of Carinthia in Klagenfurt, at Kunsthalle Giessen, Kunsthalle Basel, and the Swiss Institute in New York. Larger installations were shown as part of thematic exhibitions at Kunsthalle Vienna, at the ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art in Karlsruhe, at the SMAK Stedelijk Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent, the Lucerne Museum of Art, and the Art Museum in St. Gallen. His works are included in many collections in Switzerland, Europe, and the United States, and comprise a number of installations in public spaces.