Michael Kress is a conceptual artist, born in 1964 in Munich, Germany, living in Hamburg. The focus of his work is semiotics and language as a normative moment in the construction of a media-identity.

Kress has been examining spatial imagination in various movies of the 1960’s. Coming from a background of conceptual art, he uses different media, like video, drawing, writing, sound and photography in his examinations.

“With Lawrence and Lennon and the Four Musketiers through the desert to the cinema” is about a region in southern Spain that was the site of Europe’s worst nuclear accident. In this project, Kress seeks to show both the beauty of Andalusia and the danger hidden in the soil, a relic of the Cold War.

In 2012, Michael Kress was invited to the Funasaka Biennale, where he created a video performance of a conversation with curator Tatsuya Fuji, based on a Tom Waits song. In 2014, Michael Kress presented his latest artist-conversation project, “Adore – Artists are Fans/Fans are Artists,” in Yokohama/Japan, at ZOU-NO-HANA Terrace.

In 2024, he came back to Japan for his third participatory art project titled “I was – conversations under trees,” A participatory performance with seven artists within three generations, based on three paintings from the Hamburger Kunsthalle: Anita Rée, “Self-Portrait”, 1930, Max Liebermann, “Eva”, 1883, and Wilhelm Leibl, “The Three Women in the Church”, 1881

Three generations of women under trees – an artist with a daughter or niece, mother or grandchild, conversing about who they will have been, looking back to their lifetime in an unknown but certain future. Who they guess they would have been, with whom they identify themselves, and what they feel to be of importance looking back. What questions do they wish had been answered
from various perspectives: personal, familial, social, economic, cultural, and global?

What do I want to tell about myself when I look at my own life from a distant future? What made the time in which I could live? How was the world? And with whom was I able to experience my own story?

“I Was” is the third work in a trilogy that I realized in Japan with various artists over the last decade. In “The Innocence of the Artist,” I tried to show similarities in art and culture in which the artist holds a vigil for the sleeping curator. In a collaboration with 36 artists from Yokohama, “Adore – artists are fans and fans are artists” opened up the question of the role of art in society and the special biographical moment of each individual’s initiation, something like an artist* to be in. “I Was” tells how three generations of women retrospectively formulate their role in their own history from a narrative of the future.

In 2015 Michael initiated the network project  Hyper Cultural Passengers. This cooperation of artists, philosophers, and other cultural activists questions the myth of the autonomous, and thereby self-sufficient, subject and proposes the figure of the hypercultural passenger instead.

Michael Kress studied Visual Communication and Fine Arts at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg with Prof. Kurd Alsleben, Prof. Stanley Brouwn, Prof. Gauillaume Bijl, and Prof. B.J. Blume. Diploma and master’s student of Prof. B.J. Blume.

For several years, Kress has been engaged in cultural politics. He had been a member of the executive committee of FRISE/Hamburg, one of the longest-running artist-studio houses in Germany. From 2012–2022, he was a member of the executive committee of the Deutscher Künstlerbund (German Association of Artists). From 1996 to 2003, Michael Kress was a member of the board of the International Association of Fine Arts(iaa/UNESCO).