Photo by Adam Johnson
Yuri Z (Zupancic) is an artist based in Paris who creates paintings, sculptures, music, video, and hybrid works. His art explores enigmatic connections and dialogue between humans, nature, and technology. Yuri also curates and organizes exhibitions of contemporary and Beat Generation artists.
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 time spent in Oregon, New York, Australia, London, and Berlin, Yuri moved to Paris where he keeps a studio at Le Sample.
The artist explores the world at its extremes of scale, playing with our perceptions of space and surface and responding to the dematerialization of objects and experiences. He's always strived for what he calls 'poetic efficiency', that is to say, the most potent and pure expression of an idea or sentiment.
“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.”
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. He has also played curatorial and organizational roles in exhibitions at museums and galleries around the world, including ZKM, Pompidou Center, IMMA, and The Photographers Gallery.
Photo by Abel Lavall-Ubach © 2021