Marc Hansjörg Lieberherr (b. 1997, Switzerland) is a conceptual artist based in St Gallen, Switzerland. His research spans a range of media, including printmaking, photography, sculpture and installation, and is distinguished by its integration of conceptual art and scenographic strategies. Through an interdisciplinary approach, he addresses social, political, individual and philosophical questions by creating immersive works conceived in relation to the exhibition space. His work investigates the relationship between subjective perception and collective structures, constructing environments that engage not only physical space but also its perceptual and psychological dimensions, inviting the audience to reflect critically and participate actively.
‘Fear is not subtle. It is brutal. It shapes, paralyses and drives us to act. It insinuates itself into our thoughts, settles upon the body and permeates every social interaction; yet it often remains invisible to others. It manifests itself when we speak, but also when we remain silent. It distorts faces and alters reality.’
– Marc Hansjörg Lieberherr
What is truly unsettling is not so much the unknown as the return of something familiar that now appears transformed and alien. In his essay The Uncanny (1919), Sigmund Freud defines this tension as the essence of the Unheimlich: ‘The uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something familiar and long established in the psyche that has become estranged only through the process of repression.’
This encounter between recognition and disorientation forms the conceptual foundation of Mimic (2024-2025), Marc Hansjörg Lieberherr’s latest series of works. For the artist, fear is not merely an individual emotion but a cultural and perceptual condition that shapes bodies, language and social behaviour while often remaining invisible. Mimic gives visual form to this anxiety without a clearly defined object, tracing its effects on perception and subjectivity amid the constant uncertainty of contemporary life.
Throughout the series, the face becomes the principal field of investigation. Traditionally a symbol of identity and recognition, it is subjected to processes of erasure, fragmentation and dissolution that destabilise its apparent coherence. The portrait consequently loses its descriptive function, occupying a space suspended between presence and absence, visibility and concealment. The viewer is confronted with faces that resist recognition, poised between appearing and disappearing.
Despot (2025) forms the central core of the project. Beginning with a photograph from his own childhood, Lieberherr uses digital manipulation, collage and recomposition to dismantle the authority of the autobiographical image. The personal archive becomes a space of confrontation in which memory, fiction and identity intertwine. Reduced to an almost spectral presence, the child’s face moves beyond the autobiographical dimension to evoke a shared psychological condition.
This reflection is also brought to completion through the work’s installation. The piece is presented on a theatrical curtain that descends from the wall to the floor – a support that simultaneously conceals and reveals. The curtain becomes a symbolic threshold, suggesting that identity is always mediated through forms of appearance and staging. In this context, Freud’s concept of the Unheimlich acquires particular force: Lieberherr’s faces remain recognisably human, yet their subtle distortions transform the familiar into something quietly uncanny.
Mimic explores fear in its most everyday manifestations – shame, social anxiety, a persistent sense of inadequacy and alienation from oneself – revealing how these emotions are shaped as much by culture as by individual experience. Rather than representing fear directly, Lieberherr exposes the conditions that allow it to inhabit perception itself. The critical force of Mimic lies precisely in this continuous oscillation between the visible and the invisible, recognition and estrangement, transforming the face into a site where the fragile construction of identity is constantly called into question.
Text by Erica Massaccesi