Philipp Fürhofer (*1982 in Augsburg) is a man of the stage: the artist designs scenarios in light boxes that he hangs on the wall like paintings or combines into sculptural groups. Inside acrylic shells he layers painted, translucent substrates and objets trouvés that give rise to mysterious portraits or landscapes whose meaning shifts depending on the intensity of the light.
Fürhofer’s large stage sets—most recently for a production of Verdi’s Les vêpres siciliennes at the Royal Opera in London, for example—are equally seductive. For Die Passagierin at the Badisches Staatstheater in Karlsruhe he created a set illuminated by projections that filtered all of the elements in play. In his Eugen Onegin for De Nederlandse Opera in Amsterdam, he mixed real three-dimensional situations with a kaleidoscopic dream vision of painting, mirrors, and light.