Lionel Machris is a German photographer and visual artist based between Hamburg and Provence. Trained as a photographer, he also studied painting and graphic arts at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts (HFBK). In 1989 he moved to Paris, working with international fashion and cosmetics photographers, before continuing his career in Milan from 1992. This experience across photography, fashion, and painting laid the foundation for his fine-art practice.

Machris combines photography and painting with 24-carat gold leaf, using the reflective metal as an active pictorial surface. Photographic imagery is transferred onto specially treated gold so that colour, luminosity, and reflection shift with changing light and the viewer’s position. His works move between image and object, realism and fiction, material presence and metaphysical suggestion. Human existence, transformation, equality, desire, and the unknown recur as themes.

His international exhibitions include the Rome International Art Fair and the Venice Art Fair (2022), Artbox Expo New York, the Songzhuang Contemporary Art Archive Museum in Beijing, and Miami Art Week (2023), as well as presentations at the Rothko Museum in Daugavpils and the Hong Art Museum in Chongqing (2023–2024). In 2025, he participated in the cultural exchange exhibition “From Huangpu River to Elbe River” in Shanghai. In 2026, he is represented in the international exhibition “Seelenlandschaften” at the Museums of the Castle and Residential City of Greiz. From December 2026 to March 2027, his works will also be presented in “Symphony of Colors” at the Hong Art Museum in Chongqing.