artefakt

Michael Amesbury was born in Florida and grew up in California, Hawaii, England and Germany. Due to his nomadic existence, he has been shaped from the beginning by a wealth of cultural impressions.

Not only has he been inspired by cultural diversity, but also by the light in many of the places he has lived. The light in Florida, Hawaii and California is much more intense than in the northern latitudes and therefore colors are experienced much more intensely. For this reason, he always felt inspired by other artists who worked in, and with such light. Especially the Impressionists who worked in the Mediterranean or Tahiti, as well as Californian artists like
Richard Diebenkorn or Wayne Thiebaud .

At the end of the 1980s Amesbury worked at the Abteiberg Museum in Mönchengladbach, which at that time housed the largest collection of works in the Germany by Josef Beuys , Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg (Marx collection). Although he was still passionate about painting, his intense contact with especially Beuys' works and thoughts increasingly inspired him to work in the direction of experimental performance and site specific installation. During this time he also worked with and for various museums, galleries, culture-centric publishing houses and similar organizations.

At the same time, he began working as a freelance media designer. This eventually led to him working up to the position of art director for major design agencies in San Francisco in the early 2000s.

After his return to Germany, he continued to paint, occasionally exhibited and ran the gallery "atelier 23" in Heidelberg. He has been living in Rhineland-Palatinate for several years, and since September 2020 he is the operator of atelier artefakt since September 2020.

His current exhibition is called " Back to the Roots ", and creates a connection to where it all started...
namely with light and color.