Jürgen Drescher considers the sociopolitical potential of art and channels the expansive power of the everyday. The artist has created metal casts of mundane objects such as cardboard boxes and drains, videos, texts, and performances that dissect how context might alter experience. While still a student in Düsseldorf in 1981, he gained attention with his work Drescher Bar—in which he manned a live bar in an annual exhibition alongside peers Thomas Schütte and Katharina Fritsch. Drescher often toys with scale and maintains landmarks of wear and tear upon his objects, their functions a faint memory. Although his subjects appear to be objective, modern constructs, they heighten the viewer’s awareness of the simple luxuries afforded by globalization. In his later work, Drescher began to work with plastic casts to make larger structures that are monuments to economic and cultural exploitation. His work revolves around the ambiguity involved in the art experience and his confrontation of the factors that render an object “artwork.”

Drescher has exhibited at Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, Germany, Kunsthaus, Vienna, Kunsthalle Nuremberg, Germany, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Museum Fridericianum, Kassel, and Castello di Rivara, Italy, among others. He participated in the 7th Shanghai Biennale in 2008 and the Venice Biennale in 1990.