Photo by Abel Llaval-Ubach, 2025
Born in 1980, Yuri Zupancic is an American artist living and working in Paris, France. His most prolific medium is miniature painting directly on microchips: objects that crystallize the ambitions and paradoxes of contemporary progress. Approaching technology as a site of inquiry rather than critique, he treats the microchip as both material and metaphor. 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 hidden structures of machines that shape our world.
Working on a tiny scale, often painting with a single eyelash, Zupancic’s meditative practice resists the pressure of increasingly rapid and shallow engagement. His works do aim for an immediate impact… then something more profound. Looking closely at small details is known to activate a flow state, where regrets of the past and anxieties of the future fade away, giving way to mindful reflection. These particular microchips offer an antidote to doomscrolling.
Yuri also creates video art and hybrid works combining painting, sculpture, software, and video projection, extending his exploration of liminal spaces between the tangible and the digital.
Largely self-taught, the artist was born in Nebraska and raised in historic Dodge City, Kansas with frequent visits to Colorado. 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, 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 creating and exhibiting art in Denver, Brisbane, Berlin, and London, Yuri moved to Paris in 2016 where he keeps a studio at Le Sample.
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 NANAmusée museum of La Rochelle University as well as 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