Michael Hirschbichler

Michael Hirschbichler is a transdisciplinary artist working across art, architecture, and anthropology. His practice asks how spatial arrangements produce conceptions of the world: how memories, myths, ideologies, and projections of the future become embedded in landscapes, buildings, and infrastructures, and how such environments, in turn, shape perception, social relations, and ways of inhabiting the world. He brings these concerns together under the term spatial cosmology: an inquiry into the material and imaginary forces through which space becomes a carrier of history, power, and possibility.

 

Hirschbichler’s works emerge from sustained encounters with particular sites and their substances. Through what he calls dirty work, crude oil, nitrate, mining residues, copper, pulverised building matter, soil, mud, and water are not simply represented; they become active agents within the work. They stain, corrode, sediment, and alter its surface. Fieldwork, tracing, collecting, and material transformation are therefore not preliminary stages, but central operations in a practice in which places enter the making of images, objects, and installations in a literal sense. 

 

Working across painting, drawing, installation, sculpture, photography, print, moving image, sound, and text, Hirschbichler develops situated constellations rather than illustrations of place. His plans, images, and spatial propositions bring geographically and historically distant conditions into critical proximity. Extraction and devastation, belief and science, infrastructure and desire are rendered as mutually implicated forces within the built and natural environments of the present. His work insists on a direct and consequential question: what kind of world takes shape through the spaces we construct, inhabit, and leave behind?

 

Hirschbichler’s work has been presented at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, and Villa Medici, Rome, among other venues. He studied architecture at ETH Zurich and philosophy at Humboldt University Berlin, and completed his doctoral research on mythical constructions at Berlin University of the Arts. His research and teaching have included appointments at TU Delft, Goldsmiths, Aarhus University, and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. He is Professor of Experimental Creation and founder and director of the Center for Spatial Cosmology at HafenCity University Hamburg.