Tony Oursler
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Born: 1957

Hometown: New York, NY

Lives and Works: New York, NY

Education: BA, Fine Arts, California Institute for the Arts, Valencia, CA, 1979

Tony Oursler Bio

About The Artist

Tony Oursler works across a range of mediums: video, sculpture, installation, performance, and painting. Through technology, he explores the human psyche and its emotional disturbances like obsession, isolation, sexual fetish, escapism, and the relationship with computers and virtual platforms that dominate our lives today.

In his most famous installations, Tony Oursler creates scenes of disfigured, immobile bodies sculpted from nylon with video projections of moving faces on their heads. In some cases, Oursler projects fragmented facial features onto walls and bulbous sculptures, creating an eerie juxtaposition of animate and inanimate figures. He often places decapitated heads in uncomfortable positions on the floor or installed alongside props as more faces projected onto the heads spew a narrative. Directly engaging and "trapping" the viewer is Oursler's primary concern in art-making.

Tony Oursler Gallery Art

Galleries

Lehmann Maupin, New York, NY

Tony Oursler Permanent Collections

Select Permanent Collections

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA
Musée d'Art Contemporain, Barcelona, Spain
Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France
Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland
Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
National Museum of Osaka, Japan
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA
Staatsgalerie Moderner Kunst, Munich, Germany
Tate Gallery, London, England
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY