Michael Hirschbichler is a transdisciplinary artist working across architecture and anthropology. His work investigates the reciprocal relations between spatial arrangements and conceptions of the world: how memories, myths, ideologies, and imaginaries become materially and spatially organized—and how landscapes and built environments, in turn, shape how the world is perceived, inhabited, and transformed. He brings these concerns together in an ongoing inquiry he calls ›spatial cosmology.‹

Central to his practice is a direct engagement with sites, landscapes, and environments. Through ›dirty work,‹ Hirschbichler engages with the substances of particular places—including crude oil, saltpeter, mining waste, copper, ground-up buildings, soil, mud, and water. Fieldwork, tracing, collecting, and material transformation become means of examining territories where geological processes, infrastructures, histories, beliefs, and forms of life become entangled. Moving between research and speculative transformation, Hirschbichler works across painting, drawing, installation, sculpture, photography, print, moving image, sound, and text, using artistic media as instruments of inquiry in their own right. Each work forms a situated fragment of a spatial cosmology of the present.

Hirschbichler’s work has been shown at Villa Medici in Rome, Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, and Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, among others. His doctoral research at Berlin University of the Arts on mythical constructions in Papua New Guinea was published by Routledge. He conducted postdoctoral artistic research at TU Delft, Goldsmiths, and Aarhus University and was Visiting Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. A recipient of the Rome Prize of the German Academy Rome Villa Massimo, Hirschbichler is Professor for Experimental Creation and founder and director of the Center for Spatial Cosmology at HafenCity University Hamburg.