ZURICH.- Galerie Urs Meile presents Atelier, the first exhibition of Swiss artist Tobias Kaspar (*1984) at Galerie Urs Meile, Zurich. The exhibition brings together works from the past fifleen years, alongside new pieces that reconsider the idea of the artist’s studio as a space of myth, production, and projection. Through fabrics, surfaces, and gestures, the exhibition unfolds a layered reflection on authorship, representation, and the intersections between art, fashion, and consumer culture.
At the center of the exhibition stands Anti-Conformṅt Conformṅt Chandelier (Afler Evian, Mountain View) (2025), a shimmering chandelier made of seventy empty Evian glass boules. The fragile construction—situated somewhere between luxury object and recycled material—condenses Kaspar’s interest in the mechanisms of branding, taste, and belonging. Evian, marketed as a symbol of purity and wellness, here becomes an emblem of the seductive power of the everyday: the promise that youth, clarity, and health can be bought. Echoing Duchamp’s readymades, Kaspar transforms a banal consumer item into an object of contemplative beauty—at once ironic, alluring, and profound.
In L’Atelier Rouge (2025), Tobias Kaspar revisits the motif of the artist’s studio as both site and myth of artistic production. The title refers to Henri Matisse’s 1911 painting of the same name—a modernist key work in which color, space, and self-reflection merge. Kaspar reinterprets this lineage for the present: his layered compositions of textile textures, surfaces, and fields of red transform the studio into a hybrid space.
The series Love Under Capitalṅm (2025) unfolds as a poetic chronicle of emotional economies. Here, Kaspar engages again with Matisse’s legacy and combines re photographed Matisse interiors—cropped so tightly that only fabrics, wallpapers, and ornaments remain—with cinematic still lifes and textual fragments such as “Capitalism harnesses love for profit.” The juxtaposition of image and text creates a tension between sentiment and detachment, while the motifs resist any singular reading: neither Matisse, nor the protagonists of the film stills, nor the artist himself speak directly. Instead, a space of ambivalence emerges—one in which viewers find themselves oscillating between irony, beauty, and unease.
Living in Zurich since 2018, Tobias Kaspar (*1984, Basel, Switzerland) previously worked in Berlin, New York, and Rome, while maintaining a residence in Riga. Emerging in the early 2010s, he gained recognition for conceptual and photographic works addressing identity, authorship, and consumption within the traditions of Appropriation Art and Institutional Critique. Exhibitions such as Rented Life (MAMCO Geneva, 2022; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, 2025), Independence (Kunsthalle Bern, 2018), and The Street (Cineciuà, Rome, 2017) illustrate his continued exploration of artistic production in contemporary contexts. Kaspar is co founder of the artist and publishing collective PROVENCE, which since 2009 has operated as a platform for contemporary art in both print and digital formats.
