Cupid and Psyche: Second Kiss

The story of how Jonty Hurwitz's nano sculptures of Cupid & Psyche went missing and left a story behind.

CNN selected Jonty Hurwitz as one of the world's emerging creative voices, filming inside the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology as a new nano sculpture was crafted using quantum physics.

"CNN Ones to Watch" captures the figure of Yifat Davidoff — Jonty's art partner and life-long love — dancing delicately on a single strand of human hair. The work can only be seen through a powerful scanning electron microscope.

The documentary follows Hurwitz in the laboratory at one of the world's leading universities in engineering and natural sciences — the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany — as the alchemist turned artist crafts a new work.

The love story behind the world's smallest figurative sculpture, told from the stage of TEDxMPIStuttgart.

Jonty Hurwitz takes the audience inside the science and the romance of nano-scale art — from two-photon absorption in a UV-curing resin to a thirty-year love story that became a Guinness World Record.

A talk about how art, science and human emotion converge at a scale smaller than the width of a human hair.

How the world's smallest figurative sculptures are built — atom by atom — using quantum physics.

Each nano sculpture is built atom by atom in a UV-curing resin, using two-photon absorption to harden material at a single point in three-dimensional space.

The result: figurative forms smaller than the width of a human hair, created at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology using a custom-built multiphoton lithography system.

Cited extensively in academic publications — across both art and science.

The nano sculpture work has been the subject of peer-reviewed research across materials science, art theory and intellectual-property scholarship. A selection of the most cited and most compelling English-language papers:

1. Art on the Nanoscale and Beyond — Advanced Materials (Wiley), 2016. Read paper

2. Nanoart: Art on the Nanoscale and Beyond — Cover Feature — Advanced Materials, Vol. 28, Issue 9, 2016. Read paper

3. Molecules to Masterpieces: Bridging Materials Science and the Arts — Advanced Materials (Wiley), 2025. Read paper

4. Inverting the Paradigm: From Art to Granular Science — Leonardo (MIT Press), 2022. Read paper

5. Navigating Intellectual Property Rights, Nanotechnology and Art — Master's thesis, KU Leuven, 2018. Read paper

Browse the full citation graph on Google Scholar.

Ground-breaking film created in a Scanning Electron Microscope — in collaboration with Stefan Diller, Würzburg, Germany.

This revolutionary filming technique draws on the early days of the film industry, using stop-frame photography to painstakingly create a moving image.

Using a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) at high magnification, hundreds of images of the nano sculpture were captured as a Piezo stage was rotated to a precision of below one ten-thousandth of a degree. Each individual frame can take several minutes to capture — meaning a single second of film can take up to four hours to shoot. A painstakingly detailed process, in which any micro-blip means starting again from scratch.

All of this is achieved with a ground-breaking optical system developed by Stefan Diller in Würzburg, Germany, called Nanoflight.Creator — the only system in the world capable of SEM film.

At this scale, the very act of observation alters the subject. Electrons fired at the sculpture behave less like particles and more like waves of probability — a reminder that the quantum world refuses to sit still for its portrait.

Each resulting film is minted as a one-of-one NFT — a permanent, on-chain record of a moment that took weeks to capture and only seconds to witness.

Twice recognised by the Guinness Book of Records for the smallest sculpture of a human form ever created.

In 2015 the figure of Trust was certified by Guinness as the smallest sculpture of a human form. The Fragile Giant — a nano elephant — followed, an entire herd of which could comfortably stand on the eye of a needle.

Visitors observing nano sculptures through scientific viewing devices at the Nano Barroco public exhibition.

Because the works are invisible to the naked eye, each exhibition becomes its own choreography of microscopes, optics and quiet wonder — a meeting place between the museum and the laboratory.

The nano sculpture series has reached an estimated 30+ million people through press, broadcast and social channels.