Adam Cruces is a Swiss-American artist whose practice investigates how humans navigate and reinterpret the landscapes—physical, cultural and symbolic—that surround them.
Working across painting, sculpture and video, he transforms familiar materials into hybrid forms that oscillate between the domestic and the surreal. Through subtle shifts in context, his works collapse distinctions between obligation and leisure, nature and domestication, the familiar and the foreign. This interplay produces installations that evoke states of transition, inviting viewers to consider how environments—both constructed and imagined—shape perception and behaviour.
Born in 1985 in Houston, Texas, Cruces received his BFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2008 and his MFA in Art and Media from the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) in 2013. He has exhibited internationally, including at Kunsthaus Baselland (Basel), the Swiss Institute (Milan), the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), Kunsthaus Langenthal, kim? Contemporary Art Centre (Riga), Kunsthal Aarhus, and Museo della Frutta (Turin). His practice has been supported by numerous residencies such as Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris), Rupert (Vilnius), Cripta747 (Turin), the Sigg Art Foundation (Le Castellet), and the Nordic Artists’ Centre (Dale).
Adam Cruces lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland.