Biography

Julian Voss-Andreae, a German sculptor based in Portland (Oregon, USA) is widely known for his striking large-scale public and private commissions often blending figurative sculpture with scientific insights into the nature of reality. His sculptures are frequently shown at international art fairs and galleries and can be found in major collections all over the world. Voss-Andreae’s work has been featured in print and broadcast media worldwide and videos of his sculpture have gone viral with tens of millions of views. His expertise in diverse fields of science and a deep passion for the mysteries of the world have been a continual source of inspiration for his work.

Prior to his art career, Julian Voss-Andreae studied quantum physics and philosophy at the Universities of Berlin and Edinburgh. As a graduate student at the University of Vienna, Voss-Andreae was one of the small team led by 2022 Nobel Prize Laureate Anton Zeilinger that conducted a ground-breaking experiment in quantum mechanics in 1999. The researchers showed that even molecules as big as C-60 “Buckyballs” can reveal their fundamentally quantum nature under the right conditions. Zeilinger’s group found that a beam of them, passed through a diffraction grating, will exhibit the purely wavelike property of interference. Subsequent experiments showed how interactions with the environment (in the form of infrared photons and background gas of different densities) will gradually wash away the ‘quantum-ness’ thanks to the process of decoherence, which is now recognized as the way the classical world emerges from the quantum.