In 2025, the Zurich Art Prize, awarded annually by Museum Haus Konstruktiv and Zurich Insurance Company Ltd, goes to Brazilian artist Artur Lescher (b. 1962 in São Paulo, where he lives and works). This makes him the 18th winner of the renowned and highly endowed award.

Artur Lescher has been working as an artist since the mid-1980s and has made a name for himself in the art world with his sculptures. His oeuvre is characterised by intensive engagement with the specific properties and potential of materials, such as brass, wood and copper, among others. The sculptures exude minimalist elegance, yet despite their perfect surfaces and often cool, pared-down aesthetics, they come across as charged, alive and in motion – an effect that is particularly striking in his seemingly free-floating objects.

The first exhibition room allows this tension between strict form and subtle vitality to be experienced. Here, Lescher displays a multitude of Pendulums: These slender, stele-like objects attached to the ceiling give the impression that they are suspended by an anti-gravitational force. Associations with stellar constellations are reinforced by the shiny materials. In the piece V Sagittae, Lescher creates a monument to the Sagitta constellation’s eponymous binary star, which is inconspicuous in itself, but is expected to erupt as a nova around the year 2083 and shine as brightly as Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky. This cosmic reference opens up a dimension of temporality and transformation, incorporating Lescher’s works into a greater narrative, beyond the visible.

The retrospective examines the most important moments in Artur Lescher’s
career and gathers 120 works, including installations, sculptures, models,
and sketchbooks. The exhibition highlights how Lescher has concerned
himself with the concept of gravity since the start of his career, using
engineering and mathematics to support his own poetic expression.

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Artur Lescher’s sculpture first drew critical attention following his
participation in the 19th Bienal de São Paulo in 1987. The artist has since
gone on to explore his relationship with the exhibition space, intervening
subtly in this space to leave the observer with a memory of that place. In
pursuing this concern, his interests range from model building to astrology,
through mathematics, architecture and mythology. For the Pinacoteca
exhibition his 30 years of investigation have been separated into three
axes/rooms: (1) Narrativas Líquidas (Liquid Narratives), which examines
both the potential and the challenges of materials; (2) Suspensão
(Suspension) on verticality in sculpture; and (3) Engenharia da memória
(Engineering of Memory), which presents the artist’s investigations into a
rewriting and imaginary construction of the city.

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Narrativas Líquidas includes sculptures that offer a counterpoint to the
organic image of nature. His works in the series Rios (Rivers) (2004-
2019), for example, resemble the waterfalls and courses of rivers which,
despite having been made using solid, gross materials such as felt, paper,
wood, steel and stone, evoke transparency and fluidity. Camila Bechelany
explains “The material is not used as an art media – he defies the form
and explores spatial reality, through balance, the mass that it supports, or
even its resistance.”

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As part of FIAC 2017, the Palais d’Iéna is hosting an exhibition by Brazilian artist Artur Lescher.

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Presented for the first time in France, the artworks come from Brazilian collections or are made in-situ for the event. They propose an unprecedented dialogue with the modern classicism of the monumental spaces designed by the architect Auguste Perret. Theses volumes are revealed, according to the aesthetic experience of the works of Artur Lescher, as places intrinsically open, articulated and dynamic. Renewing this way with the initial model of the ancient portico and with its democratic dimension, the artist opens the place, symbolically, outwardly but also on a more intimate register, towards the perceptual mechanics of the viewer.

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The Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, the institution of the Secretary of State for Culture, presents site specific Inabsência Artur Lescher (São Paulo, 1962). For the project Octagon Contemporary Art the artist developed a dome 12m x 14m, using brass and wood, which evokes the history of the building of the Pinacoteca, however, shifted from their original context and devoid of its functions, since it is reversed. Designed by Ramos de Azevedo in 1905, the original design of the building of the Pinacoteca provided a dome that would occupy the center of the building, which now receives works of contemporary art inside the Octagon Project.

When I was invited to exhibit at the Octagon, I researched a lot about the configuration of this space and found that, originally, he would host a summit that was never built. So the idea of ​​this work is to work with the issue of memory and architecture, making visible a project, an idea that was not effective, but still continues to operate in space. About the show title, Lescher said: Inabsência is a neologism from the complete absence anachronism [absence] to denote the absence of the absence, or presence of what was missing, or something that introduces the absence. It is a word constructed with two negations (In) and (A), this results in a double negative positivity in case a presence. This is one reason for the reversal of the dome.

The São Paulo Artur Lescher stands out in the panorama of contemporary Brazilian art for his three-dimensional works. These are works that exceed the character of sculptures, crossing languages ​​installation and object to modify the understanding of these and space in which they operate.

Lescher gained nationwide recognition from their participation at the 19th Bienal de São Paulo in 1987, where he presented aerolite, and, in 2002, to participate in the 25th Bienal de São Paulo, with Indoor Landscape. Among the more recent group exhibitions include: Incomplete Nature, Cultural Center of Usiminas in Ipatinga, Brazil (2010), and Memorial Revisited - 20 years in Latin America Memorial (2009); Almost Net at Itaú Cultural (2008) and 80 | 90 Modern Postmodern etc., the Instituto Tomie Ohtake (2007), all in São Paulo, Brazil.

Some of his recent solo exhibitions were held at Del Paseo Gallery, Punta del Este, Uruguay (2012), Meta-metric, the OMR Gallery, Colonia Roma, Mexico (2011), and Rio Machine at Galeria Nara Roesler, Sao Paulo , Brazil. It has works in major collections such as the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo and MAM-SP, both in São Paulo, Brazil, in MALBA, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Houston Museum of Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, both in the United States.

Text facilitated by la Galería y / o Room Exposiciones

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