Photo by Abel Llaval-Ubach, 2025
Born in 1980, Yuri Zupancic is an American artist living and working in Paris, France. He is best known for miniature paintings made directly on microchips—objects that crystallize the ambitions and paradoxes of contemporary technological progress. Approaching technology as a site of inquiry rather than critique, he treats the microchip as both material and metaphor.
Working on a tiny scale, often painting with a single eyelash, Zupancic’s practice resists the flashy, maximalist aesthetics of consumer culture while echoing the relentless miniaturization of our most powerful and coveted devices. His work is driven by a fascination with the symbolism and mysterious elegance of circuitry—forms typically hidden from view. Painting on the very components that transmit and store private data, emotions, and memories, he gives visual form to a felt digital presence while highlighting the physical structure of machines that have been radically changing our world over the past decades.
Alongside the micro-scale paintings, Zupancic creates hybrid works combining painting, sculpture, software, and video projection, occupying liminal spaces between the tangible and the digital. These works are reflections of hybrid experiences, and explorations of technological evolution as a force intimately shaping our lives.
“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, the artist was born in 1980 in Nebraska. He was raised in historic Dodge City, Kansas with frequent visits to Colorado where he developed a lifelong fascination with natural phenomena and grandiose landscapes. A 'xennial', his adolescence was marked by the arrival of the internet and software such as Photoshop, which he began using in 1996 —shortly after he began painting.
At 19, he moved to Chicago where he worked in a factory, then to Lawrence, KS where he began working for the Estate of William S. Burroughs and found inspiration in the company of beatnik artists, writers, and counter-cultural thinkers. During this time he also co-founded the Fresh Produce Art Collective which created a plethora of exhibitions and several galleries. After extensive travels in USA, Europe, and a year spent living in Brisbane, Australia, Yuri moved to Paris in 2015 where he keeps a studio at Le Sample. In 2025, he co-founded There Will Be Art, an association dedicated to the exhibition of hybrid art forms.
Zupancic’s work has been exhibited at galleries, museums and art fairs in Paris, London, Taipei, Berlin, Cologne, New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, Sydney, Wellington, etc, and been published by WIRED, Juxtapoz, Huffington Post, New York Times, Ouest France, and others. Yuri is honored to have his work included in the collections of notable thinkers and cultural figures such as Douglas Hofstadter, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, François and Ayyam Sureau, and Jean-Jacques Lebel.
Yuri also writes, curates and organizes exhibitions of contemporary hybrid art and Beat Generation artists. He has played curatorial and organizational roles in exhibitions at museums including ZKM, Pompidou Center, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Poster House, Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, and The Photographers Gallery, London.
Photo by Abel Llaval-Ubach, 2025