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.