Tobias Spichtig

Tobias Spichtig (b. 1982, Lucerne, Switzerland) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work spans painting, sculpture, installation, and photography. Drawing from the visual languages of fashion, music, and theater, Spichtig explores the intersections of public and private life, intimacy and artifice, and individuality within mass culture. His signature aesthetic fuses a glamorously detached cool with a haunting stillness, often manifesting in ghostly portraits, flattened figures, and object-based installations composed of quotidian materials like sunglasses, refrigerators, and mattresses.

Spichtig’s paintings challenge conventions of representation through a deliberate erasure of depth and volume, creating images that are at once emotionally charged and materially austere. As noted by Elena Filipovic in her text for his 2024 solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel, “bodies, faces, flowers, or mountains never quite emerge… each picture’s subject holds its pose in strange, morbid stillness.” Spichtig’s practice is a continuous meditation on visibility and disappearance, surface and sincerity—where even the most familiar object or figure becomes strange under his gaze.