Antoine Wagner

Antoine Wagner is a French American contemporary artist and film director whose multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, painting, drawing, film, photography, performance, sound, and installation. At the core of his work lies an exploration of the deep connectivity between nature, geography, mythology, and the sublime, alongside recurring themes of identity, transformation, and resurrection.

Wagner’s practice is grounded in a sustained attention to material, silence, and spatial experience. His paintings and drawings often function as meditative terrains rather than representations, evoking landscapes through texture, matter, and rhythm. Using materials such as sand, earth, ashes, and pigment, his surfaces carry a fossil like presence, as though forms emerge from within the work itself. His drawing series unfolds as constellations of variation, where each work marks a precise point of intuition, mapped like coordinates within an expanding artistic cosmos.

This sensitivity to atmosphere and transition extends into Wagner’s engagement with cinema and opera. His work frequently considers thresholds, concealment and revelation, sound and resonance, placing the viewer in an immersive, often contemplative position. Whether through moving image, installation, or photographic abstraction, Wagner invites the audience into spaces shaped by tension, stillness, and embodied perception.

Wagner studied Theater and Political Science at Northwestern University and Sciences Po Paris, before continuing his studies at NYU Tisch. He later worked as an assistant to Palme d’Or winner Michael Haneke, an experience that deeply informed his approach to time, silence, and narrative structure.

His work has been presented internationally at institutions including the Tiroler Festspiele Erl, Austria, Les Archives Nationales in Paris, the National Gallery of Armenia, the New World Center in Miami, the Goethe Institute in Tokyo, the Deck Museum in Singapore, the Museum für Völkerkunde in Hamburg, the Collection Lambert in Avignon, the Theater of St Gallen in Switzerland, and Palazzo Vendramin in Venice.

Wagner has completed residencies at the Watermill Center in New York and Villa Medici in Rome. In 2013, he was awarded the Prix Lyrique Pierre Bergé for his publication with Verlag für Moderne Kunst, Wagner in der Schweiz.


“Wagner approaches visual art with a musical sensibility. His work is structured around rhythm, repetition, and pause, allowing silence to carry as much weight as form.” Beatrice Masi