Adrien Missika (Paris, 1981) lives and works in Berlin. Co-founder of the art space 1m3 in Lausanne in 2006, he graduated from ECAL (École cantonale d’art de Lausanne) in 2007. He has had numerous personal exhibitions including: 21er Haus in Vienna, Kunsthaus Glarus, Switzerland, Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris; Centre d’art contemporain Genève, Switzerland and Palais de Tokyo in Paris. His work has also been shown in many group exhibitions, among which at Centre Pompidou, Paris; Metro Pictures, New York; Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau; Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, Montecarlo; Le Magasin, Grenoble; Fotomuseum Winterthur and Centre Pompidou Metz. In 2009 he was awarded the Swiss Art Award, in 2011 the Prize of the Fondation Ricard and the Kiefer Hablitzel Prize.
Missika is an artist who we could call a contemporary neo-romantic for his ability to force the observer to take on a viewpoint that contains elements belonging to times and geographies near and far at once. Missika’s art comes out of a practice combining technological deftness and manual skill, often having the appeal of the past mixed with the contemporary era. The results may be vital or decadent, reassuring or disquieting, and they always have an element of melancholy. He uses low-resolution videos, pictures taken with very long exposure times, ever changing print processing methods, sculptures made with reused objects and new materials, images of desolate, and magnetic places paired with soundtracks from artificial ambient noise, specifically designed for each occasion. Though Missika’s works appear immediately interpretable, they are actually built on layers of multiple historical, anthropological, alchemical, scientific references, plus, and not least, cultural and experiential ones. Driven by his personal vocation for the exotic, he does his research on site, giving him opportunities to assimilate, demolish and reconstruct anew, including through the time factor, the clichés through which each of us unconsciously builds a certain image, often a stereotyped one, of things far from us.