Hans Danuser (19 March 1953 – 26 August 2024) was a Swiss artist and photographer. His first major work, the cycle In Vivo, brought him international fame, therein he broke several societal taboos with respect to genetic research and nuclear physics. Since the 1990s, in addition to his photographic studies, Danuser has focused increasingly on transdisciplinary (research) projects in the arts and sciences.

Danuser had been invited to contribute to international events such as the biennales in Venice and Lyon. He is one of the first photographers to have taken the conceptually compelling step of presenting his large-format tableaux on the floor in a museum exhibition. In the 1980s Danuser embarked on his cycle In Vivo, completing it in 1989. Contemporaneously he produced architectural photographs in the project Partituren und Bilder/Scores and Pictures. In 1990 Danuser won the competition for the large-scale design of the walls at the University of Zurich-Irchel, which led to the Institutsbilder (1992). He later completed another project in an architectural context, the Schiefertafel Beverin (2000–2001). The Frozen Embryo Series, made in the 1990s, a follow-up of In Vivo, also prefigured two ongoing works, The Erosion Project and Entscheidungsfindung – Decision taking.

Danuser was born in Chur on 19 March 1953. After working in Zürich for the German advertising and fashion photographer Michael Lieb from 1972 to 1974, Danuser began experimenting with light-sensitive emulsion at the ETHZ Federal Institute of Technology Zurich.

Danuser was primarily based in Zürich.

Danuser died on 30 August 2024, at the age of 71.

The series of works consists of found and staged stencil paintings, created by means of paint-spray cans on different supports, at the intersection of public and private space. They have been photographed since the 1980s in various cities in Europe and the United States. The ephemeral in the existence of the stencil images on physical substrates is taken up by Danuser's photography and transformed by means of digital image processing and sublimation printing technique on aluminum, into images that in their brilliantly reflective appearance, suggest ephemeral and digital screen surfaces (Peer 2019).

The Matographs – The-One-Million-Pound-Projekt (work in progress) was developed with the research departments of Ciba-Geigy (today Novartis), Basel, and Bayer Werke / Agfa Gevaert, Leverkusen (today AGFA). By patenting "matographs," a new photographic process, Danuser pursued the goal of being able to "process [a] substrate with color according to [his] ideas before coating it with a photographic black-and-white emulsion (Sadkowsky 2018, 7), in contrast to commercially available photographic papers, which have a white layer support. Thus, at the turn from analog to digital photography, he succeeds in "introduce[ing] a new perspective, namely direct[ing] the photographer's gaze to the otherwise unnoticed background [of a photographic print]."(Folkers, 2018, 86).

The Counting Out Rhymes project on the subject of Entscheidungsfindung – Decision taking (work in progress) involves video stations and art-in-architecture. Danuser is interested in the approaches and models used in taking decisions as a social and political instrument, ranging from mathematical theory to the practical counting-out rhymes of children. The rhymes – "a mixtum compositum of reason and imagination" – are as significant as mathematical formulae and physical laws inasmuch as they are grounded in “nonrational processes of taking decisions” and therefore reflect the fundamental structure of contemporary models of thought.