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Fernando Casasempere

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Fernando Casasempere was born in Santiago de Chile in 1958 and trained
at Scola Forma and Escuela de Arte y Oficios, Barcelona. He moved to London in 1997, where he currently lives and works. Fernando Casasempere works with clay, ceramic, and industrial matter, redefining the possibilities of these materials for contemporary sculpture. Through a fascination with the imprint left by humans on the earth, Casasempere draws on archaeology, geology, landscape and classical and modern architecture to subvert sculptural archetypes, while speaking to urgent global ecological and social concerns through the lens of his native Chile.

Casasempere has exhibited extensively in the UK, Chile, North America, Japan and Europe and is renowned for monumental installations including the critically acclaimed Out of Sync at Somerset House, London (2012) – which inspired Paul Cummins’s and Tom Piper’s WWI commemorative centenary installation Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red at Tower of London (2014) – and Back to the Earth at New Art Centre, Salisbury (2005). Recent commissions (2021) include permanent works near London’s Tottenham Court Road Station (Derwent) and at Henrietta House (CBRE).

Everything bears the mark of [my] own strong hands. [I generate] layer after layer of meaning, all of it is grounded in [my] touch.

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  • 09.13.24

    A Man of Substance

    When Fernando Casasempere moved from Chile to London, in 2007, the first exhibition he saw was Sensation, the famous (and infamous) showcase for the Young British Artists at the Royal Academy. “It made me feel prehistoric,” he says. And little wonder. He’d come from an artistic culture still rooted in modernism, and had an personal aesthetic orientation toward Mesoamerican culture. After studying sculpture in Barcelona and then returning to Santiago, he’d found immediate success, securing major museum exhibitions despite his youth. He felt at once confirmed and confined; it was almost too easy. Casasempere knew that to grow as an artist, he would need to seek out new challenges – and so it was that he came to London, and found himself face-to-face with a shark floating in formaldehyde.

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