Photo by Abel Llaval-Ubach, 2025
Yuri Zupancic is an American artist now living in Paris. Most known for his miniature paintings on microchips, he also creates sculptures, video art, paintings and hybrid works. The artist believes everything is connected, and is particularly fascinated by the ever-evolving links between nature and technology. Seeking élan vital (life force) in unlikely places, Yuri's work teases naturalistic elegance out of synthetic materials.
“Smaller and Faster’ is the new ‘Bigger and Better’ and that applies to communications as much as to commodities,” Zupancic said in The Huffington Post. “Computers provide ways to share passionate thoughts, yet the hardware itself seems cold and sterile ... so I paint life into it."
Largely self-taught, Yuri was born in 1980 and raised in rural Dodge City, Kansas with frequent visits to Colorado where he developed a lifelong fascination with natural phenomena and grandiose landscapes. He later moved to Chicago, then Lawrence, KS where he worked for the Estate of William S. Burroughs and also co-founded the Fresh Produce Art Collective and Dot Dot Dot Artspace. After extensive travels in USA, Europe, and Australia, Yuri moved to Paris where he keeps a studio at Le Sample.
Integrating visual and audio art, Yuri collaborates with the Anagram Ensemble and Infrequent Seams label on videos and performances including a multi-media opera which premiered in New York in 2019. He also creates video mapping installations, often with the objective of giving life to inanimate objects or landscapes, making mountains talk and walls breathe.
Yuri’s work has been exhibited at galleries, museums and art fairs in Paris, London, Berlin, Cologne, New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, Sydney, Wellington, etc and been published by WIRED, Juxtapoz, Huffington Post, London Times, New York Times, Ouest France, and many others. Yuri also writes, translates, curates and organizes exhibitions of contemporary and Beat Generation artists. He has played curatorial and organizational roles in exhibitions at museums and galleries around the world, including ZKM, Pompidou Center, IMMA, Poster Gallery, Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, and The Photographers Gallery, London.