Saskia Fischer (1986, Stuttgart, Germany) is an interdisciplinary artist who encourages the exploration of new artistic paradigms that reflect on our identity in the world in relation to landscape and urbanism. Through images, objects, texts, and spaces—both closed and open—her work examines new ways of understanding new possible identities in the Western world. What means “natural”? What space do women occupy in public spaces? How does the queer community inhabit the city? What about us in materiality?
We spoke with Saskia Fischer about art, intersectionality, public spaces, the importance of family cultural wealth, the gender pay gap, and much more.
1. How has the evolution process of your work been since you started as an artist?
For the past eight years I have centered my practice around the relationship between identity and landscape. This is so simple and relatable, yet immensely complex as a research subject. The first work with this focus was the sculptural work État (2018), where I primarily looked at architecture and the huge lack of female representation in urbanism. From there, I went further into discourses around the nature-culture divide, ecology, queer-feminism, and posthumanism. This led me to the photographic works Violets (2021) and Pansies (2024), and the neon and glass installation Lights (2022), all works for public space. And recently the site-specific performance Stirling Ballet (2024) commissioned for the post-modern wing of Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart. My latest work, The Night Gardener (2025), is a short film on otherness, language, and the environment.
I prefer when the work is rooted in a specific location and context. I keep returning to the same methods and motifs in my practice: lens-based image-making, working with glass and metal, performance, and text – this is my material repertoire. This evolution is inseparable from my personal growth, without the work being explicitly about me.
The Night Gardener (2025) by Saskia Fischer. Courtesy of Saskia Fischer
2. What is the first connection with art that you remember?
I remember catalogues and postcards of Rodin and Chagall at my grandparents' house, while classical music radio was running in the kitchen. Mum went with me to Stuttgart to see Yves Klein’s paintings. As a child, I was encouraged to learn the piano and play theatre. Although I wasn’t raised in economically privileged terms, I am so blessed that I grew up in a family that valued cultural education.
3. Your work, Lights, is a dialogue between identity and landscape. How do you come to represent new symbols and paradigms for women and queer people within their visibility in society? What can you tell us about the reflection behind it?
Lights was conceived in 2022 for apiece, a freestanding vitrine gallery in Vilnius located in a public park. From proposal to execution, I treated the work for this space as public art. What's wonderful about this gallery is that you can work in the public without being constrained by outdoor conditions. It’s surely not the only reason, but a major factor affecting art in public space is that it uses specific materials and is often monumental and imposing. It’s often embedded in an architectural context that doesn’t speak of equality, or even considers it. There are so few examples of buildings, squares, and art in the urban landscape by women, or that speak to women, let alone queer people.I wanted to make a difference with this opportunity and through my material choices. Neon, with its hints to nightlife and as a form of public communication, felt like the right medium to address a diverse public.
The work is made of six individually shaped and differently colored neon lights that hang freely inside the vitrine. It proposes a new language and symbols for the urban environment. Rather than thought-out sentences or a grand statement, Lights is composed of intuitive writing that transforms into speculative signage for the future of public space. The shapes are surprisingly anthropomorphic and animated. What's so wonderful about Lights is that it radiates into the surrounding area, stretching further than the gallery’s perimeter. The objective was to bring joy, color, and organic shapes into that place. I wanted to have fun and share that enthusiasm with the general public, without the weight of a heavy message.
I am so proud of Lights and immensely grateful to the curators Aušra Trakšelytė and Milena Černiakaitė for commissioning it for their space in Vilnius. They had so much trust in me and the idea behind this work. Since this first exhibition, Lights has been exhibited at seven different locations within Europe in the last two years.
Lights (2022) by artist Saskia Fischer. Photo Paul Kuimet. Photo courtesy Saskia Fischer
4. We see that you prioritize working with light and glass, what do the materials you usually work with hold for you?
It’s the seeming contradictions embedded in the glass that fascinate me. It’s hard and fragile, industrial and artisanal, it has thousands of years of history while also a highly technological material. It's domestic, while found in abundance in commercial contexts. Light has such a strong attraction and appeal, especially together with glass. I find it fascinating how the material takes on a different meaning when terms like "glass ceiling" come up, that describe invisible barriers that most marginalized people can hardly overcome.
Lights (2022) glass detail. By artist Saskia Fischer. Photo Paul Kuimet. Photo courtesy Saskia Fischer
5. In this same work, what value does color have in each piece?
In my undergraduate studies, I studied Josef and Anni Albers intensely. It was at an exhibition in Düsseldorf in 2012 that I saw Josef Albers' glass work for the first time. I read his Interaction of Color, did the exercises, and learned about optical phenomena and color as a cultural signifier. I continued with Michel Pastoureau. His book on the color blue is mind-blowing. One of my first works, Thirty Slides (2012), came about as a direct result of this research. It’s a still-life photograph of colored slides on an architectural light box. I see so much in this photograph that later became the formal foundation of Lights (2022). For Lights in particular, I wanted it to be colorful, cheery, and joyful, going against the gray and seriousness of architecture and asphalt in urban landscapes. I looked at the range of colored glass that was available and how those could combine with either neon or argon gas that discharge red-orange and blue. I wanted to have a large variety of colors and play with the contrast between glass color and gas discharge in each element.
Saskia Fischer Thirty Slides. Photo courtesy of Saskia Fischer
Lights (2022) by artist Saskia Fischer. Photo courtesy of Saskia Fischer
6. Neon creates a plasticity that generates an expansive atmosphere around it. What changes have you observed in the process of working on the piece in your studio compared to installing it outdoors?
There is a transformation that a piece undergoes when you introduce it to an exhibition space. At least, I feel that way about my work. I use my studio less for production, but as a place of thinking and conceptualizing the work, while most of the production takes place outside the studio in specialized production facilities and workshops. The studio and the workshops fulfill very practical objectives. Those are great places for experimentation, while the exhibition space carries this potential to elevate a piece from an etude to a final work. While many artworks benefit from a white-cube situation, in the case of Lights (2022), the opposite is true. The contrast of the neons to the urban landscape was fantastic. The piece thrived in that environment. Or when I exhibited one of the lights at a baroque palace last autumn – it’s that contrast that makes the work truly come to life.
Lights (2022) by Saskia Fischer. Monrepos Exhibition (2024). Lights Eternal Blossoming. Photo Doku Ansicht 
Lights (2022) for apiece, an independent showcase gallery in Vilnius. Photo courtesy of Saskia Fischer.
7. We read in your biography that your work is largely a debate on femininity, what is “natural,” and the figure of the woman. Could you tell us about the debate your work raises?
Many of us are familiar with statements that start with “It’s in the nature of a woman…” or heard someone say homosexuality would be “unnatural,” or trans-ness would not exist in nature, or have heard racist theory, nasty stuff, that tries to weaponize the term nature and hold it against our bodies, as a means to police and colonize us.
That got me interested in learning about what nature they are talking about? Turns out, most people seem to have a strong image of what nature is, but cannot describe it. Why? Because nature does not exist as a thing, as an object – it only exists as a rather vague and in parts self-contradicting concept based on a flawed binary-understanding of the world. We must challenge this misconception of nature and the ‘natural world’, if we want to enact our right to self-determination and bodily autonomy now and into the future.
8. How do you combine writing with creating artwork? How does that synergy come about, and how important is your writing in your work?
Writing is so difficult. I have such a hard time with it, yet it’s such a good exercise to verbalize and understand what it is that I am doing and what I want to achieve. Since my studies, I keep filling Moleskine notebooks, about one or two every year. I’ve got so many of them now. I sometimes go back to them, look at drawings and notes I made at certain times, revisit feelings and thoughts I had, ideas that are still waiting to be realized. Over the years, a writing practice grew out of this exercise of making notes and keeping records and drawings. I didn’t fully realize until some years ago how much my work has begun exploring language. Lights (2022) is based on intuitive script and communicating with a diverse public, The Night Gardener (2025), explores language and myth from the perspective of a migrant other, and there are texts and poems that I have published, such as A (2017) and The City is a Forest (2019–2022).
9. How is life as a female artist?
The gender pay gap in visual arts in Germany is 30% – I am not joking. The median income for women artists is €16,686, with half of all artists earning less than €5,000 with their artistic labor – as a reminder, the poverty line for a single-person household in this country is currently at €14,955. Nine in 10 artists face poverty in old age. If you think this is depressing, look at the statistics concerning artists with caring responsibility.
Money is often a struggle and a place for great anxiety, especially when you need to pay collaborators but are not earning enough yourself. I think a lot of the asymmetries that we experience come from an unequal distribution of financial resources but also a lack of education, unfortunately. Talking about money is neither shameful nor difficult, it’s necessary!
So what is it like to be a female artist? It can be the most fantastic life if you find friends, allies, family, companions, people you trust, and collaborators that you vibe with. Finding caring support is the most valuable aspect, because it will carry you for a long time into the future.
