Lori Hersberger was born in 1964 in Basel, Switzerland. He studied video art and sculpture at the Basel School of Art and Design. At the beginning of the 1990s 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. His 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 lives and works in Zürich.