Born 1959 in Zurich, Switzerland, Adrian Schiess lives and works Mouans-Sartoux, France.

“But I can also just sit on a chair and dream that colors are floating by, and then the same board is purple, blue and green. This is related to the way I associate the idea of inner spaces with colour. The relationship of color and space is much more important to me than, for instance, it´s connection with form or illustration. Obviously color and form are related but the meaning of form is secondary in this respect. Painting is always bound up with matter, and so, depending on your point of view, there´s something bleak about it. (…)”

– Excerpted from a conversation between Christoph Schenker and Adrian Schiess in Zurich 1989/90.

For Adrian Schiess, a picture is successful when the painter accomplishes both nature and a representation of nature. Within Adrian Schiess’s oeuvre, the paintings are variations of what his other works – the reflecting color boards, the photographs enlarged beyond recognition – have always dealt with: the emergence of the real. Within contemporary art, they show a commitment to abstraction, which, according to Adrian Schiess, is the only way to show that which is not subject to any determination extrinsic to itself. Schiess has had solo exhibitions at Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain PACA, Marseille, France, the Bündner Kunstmuseum, Chur, Switzerland, Musée d’Art Moderne, St. Etienne, France, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana, Städtische Galerie Nordhorn, Germany, Villa Merkel, Galerien der Stadt Esslingen, Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Switzerland, Fundación la Caixa, Barcelona, Neues Museum, Staatliches Museum für Kunst und Design, Nürnberg, Kunsthaus Bregenz, FRAC Bourgogne, Dijon, France, Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Johanneum, Graz, The New York Kunsthalle, New York, Kunsthalle Zurich, Switzerland, and many institutional group exhibitions all over the world.

Adrian Schiess is represented by Galerie Tanit Munich.