Simone Decker studied at the École supérieure des arts décoratifs and the Université des sciences humaines in Strasbourg between 1988 and 1992, followed by a year at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, where she settled in 1995. From 2008 to 2015, she taught at the Nuremberg Academy of Fine Arts, and in 2025 joined Kultur½lx – Arts Council Luxembourg.

From the early 1990s, her works already indicate an interest in unusual materials – synthetic resin, latex, multi-coloured sewing pins and sweets, amongst others – and in occupying space in a way that confounds expectations, often the result of a prolonged and arduous physical process. They defy categorisation and are, for the most part, ephemeral and created in situ. The works exist in dialogue with the settings in which they occur, and are steeped in formal contrasts and conceptual oppositions: attraction-repulsion, object-building, finite-infinite, infinitesimal-immense.

In 1996, invited to exhibit in a private gallery, S. Decker created a pink latex mould of the exhibition room: mis en abyme, folded and ready for transport, the exhibition space transformed into a kind of sickly, innocuous candy (Untermieter, [Subletter, 1996]). At the Venice Biennale she displayed a series of photographs of larger-than-life chewing gum sculptures invading the alleyways and squares of the Cité des Doges (Chewing in Venice, 1999). At the Synagogue de Delme she built an awe-inspiring labyrinth from nearly 50,000 metres of adhesive tape, plunging the viewer into a vibrant, three-dimensional all-over piece.

Though they tend to disappear in the final result, the various stages of her approach are one way in which the work conveys its meaning. For instance, for Ghosts (2004), S. Decker wrapped sculptures in public spaces in Luxembourg in medical bandages before taking casts of them using synthetic resin infused with phosphorescent pigments. The copies were then arranged in descending height order on the roof of the annex of Casino Luxembourg: at night, reflecting the light they have stored up during the day, they call into question the notion of art in public spaces, and their own existence.

Material and logistical challenges are an inherent part of S. Decker’s projects, and often oblige institutions to go beyond their physical and organisational thresholds: at the Mudam, she piled crates of works from the museum’s permanent collection into a teetering Tower of Babel, drily drawing attention to the inability of the institution to render everything visible, and reversing the sacrosanct relationship between the art and the viewer (Second Life, 2010). At the Grand Café – Centre d’art in Saint-Nazaire, she appropriated the immense space of the disused submarine base from the Second World War, placing within the imposing, outsized building a polyurethane foam model of itself at a 1:10 scale. Children and adults were then invited to treat the work as a playground, and even to tear bits off it, ideally until the work itself vanished (Le Grand Soufflé [The Great Soufflé], 2011).

S. Decker has been invited to create several projects in public buildings, including Implantate, 2019 (police station, Grevenmacher) and Magnificatio, 2021 (national health laboratory, Luxembourg). Her works are held in the collections of Mudam Luxembourg, the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, the FRAC in Paris and several FRACs in France