Biography

Biography

Sylvester Zagato (b. 1997, Geneva) is a Swiss artist living and working in Berlin, Germany.

Before turning fully to art, Zagato trained and worked in horticulture in Switzerland until 2019. This experience shaped his sensitivity to growth, repetition, organic structures, and the systems through which living forms interact. During this period, he began painting and gradually developed a visual language rooted in abstraction, repetition, and emotional experience.

After relocating to Berlin in 2020, Zagato expanded his practice from painting into sculpture and installation. Across these different media, his work explores psychological and bodily experiences through forms that often draw from natural structures and processes.

His work has been exhibited in Germany and Switzerland, has received distinctions from the American Art Awards, and is held in private collections internationally.

Statement

I work across painting, sculpture, photography, and installation, exploring the body as both a physical presence and a site shaped by psychological and social forces. Repetition is central to my practice: gestures, surfaces, forms, and bodily fragments accumulate until they become larger structures. Through material and spatial experiences, I examine anxiety, obsession, sacrifice, belonging, and exclusion. Rather than illustrating these subjects directly, I use texture, density, repetition, and the physical qualities of materials to consider how bodies carry experience and are shaped, organized, or transformed by the systems surrounding them.