Antoine Wagner

Antoine Wagner (ˈvɑːɡnər , ɑ̃twan vaɡnɛʁ; born Antoine Amadeus Wagner-Pasquier; 1982) is an American-French visual artist. He works between Woodstock, NY and Paris, France. Through a visual language drawn from nature his work refers to mythological narratives and the sublime. Wagner was born in Evanston, Illinois. He is the son of German opera manager Eva Wagner-Pasquier and is the great-great-grandson of the composer Richard Wagner. He graduated from Northwestern University, Illinois, and Sciences Po, Paris, with a double bachelor's degree in Theatre and Political Science in 2005. He continued his education in film at the School of Continuing and Professional Studies at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 2007. Wagner's medium include video, sound, sculpture, performance and photography, which he exhibits through installations, site-specific projects, film, monumental photography and opera. Through the visual language of nature, his work references music, mythology and the romantic. Wagner's multifaceted practice has created an entire visual language to engage the audience in communicating with nature. Abstract unseen anthropomorphic shapes found in nature and minerals are the main actors of this world of mythologies and cyclical redundancies. Through different medium and projects, the artist examines the themes of identity, geography and spirituality and offers to the viewer an escape from traditional geographic and artistic boundaries. Through his exhibitions including Exil (Museum am Rothenbaum, 2013), Kundry (La Filature de Mulhouse 2015), Wagner applied his experience in the moving image to photography, exploring the possibilities of narrative in a silent and motionless environment through large-scale abstract photography. In 2018, Wagner directed Act II of the Opera Die Walkure at Frank Gehry's New World Center in Miami. Wagner's site-specific multimedia installation Sentimental Analysis (April 2019) is a response to the legend of Ara the Beautiful at The National Gallery of Armenia.