Adrien Missika is an artist-traveler whose neo-romantic work contains time-based and geographical elements that are simultaneously near and far. Missika's art comes out of a practice combining technological deftness and manual skill, often mixing historical reference with that of the contemporary era.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 in fact built on layers of anthropological, alchemical, scientific and cultural references. Driven by his personal vocation for the exotic, he does his research on site, giving him opportunities to assimilate, demolish and reconstruct anew, disassembling the clichés through which each of us unconsciously builds a certain image, often a stereotyped one, of things far from us.

Missika is the co-founder of the art space 1m3 in Lausanne in 2006. He has had numerous personal exhibitions including Kunsthaus Glarus, Switzerland, Galerie Edouard Manet, Centre d'art contemporain de Gennevilliers, France, Centre d'art contemporain de Genève, Switzerland and Palais de Tokyo, Paris. His work has also been shown in many group exhibitions, among which at Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris, Ellis King, Dubin,  Metro Pictures, New York, Pilar Corrias, London, Museo cantonale d'arte, Lugano, Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, Montecarlo, Le Magasin, Grenoble, Fotomuseum Winterthur and Centre Pompidou, Paris. In 2009 he was awarded the Swiss Art Award, in 2011 the Prize of the Fondation Ricard and the Kiefer Hablitzel Prize. 

Courtesy of Quartz Studio