Paul Pfeiffer
An artist working in the field of video, photography, installation art and sculpture since the late nineties, Paul Pfeiffer is well known and celebrated for his highly sophisticated use of digital technologies and new media, probing the way these technologies at once shape and alter our daily visual experience. By digitally manipulating or erasing elements from iconic images, many of them taken from sports events or Hollywood films, Pfeiffer adopts today’s frenetic visual language in order to explore our culture’s obsession with spectacle. By focusing on how the contemporary image-making and circulation tends to render people as objects rather than subjects, Pfeiffer stages the `otherness´ of the image through an artistic investigation that examines, resists, and exploits spectacle by honing in on and isolating representational codes that otherwise tend to enthrall the viewer.
Paul Pfeiffer (b.1966, Honolulu) lives and works in New York. He has received numerous awards and fellowships including a Fulbright-Hayes Fellowship and the Bucksbaum Award from the Whitney Museum. In November 2023 his first US retrospective opened at the The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles. Selected exhibitions include the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham UK; Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge US; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; MUSAC León, León; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Baibakov Art Projects, Moscow; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin; Artangel, London; Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila. His work is held in international collections including LACMA, Los Angeles; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Pinault Collection, Paris; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Sammlung Goetz, Munich and MoMA, New York.
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Exhibitions at carlier | gebauer
- 01/23 Iman Issa / Julie Mehretu / Paul Pfeiffer / Leonor Serrano Rivas / Jessica Rankin / Jorinde Voigt, Under the Influence of the Ellipse
- 09/21 Paul Pfeiffer, Incarnator
- 02/20 Sebastián Díaz Morales / Hélène Delprat / Michel François / Cecilia Edefalk / Vincent Gicquel / Paul Graham / Dor Guez / Kyungah Ham / Tarik Kiswanson / Julie Mehretu / Caroline Mesquita / Richard Mosse / Oscar Muñoz / Paul Pfeiffer / Laure Prouvost / Edi Rama / Erik Schmidt / Nida Sinnokrot / Thomas Schütte / Mark Wallinger, So what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?
- 03/19 Paul Pfeiffer, Incarnator
- 01/17 Sebastián Díaz Morales / Michel François / Paul Graham / Santu Mofokeng / Andreas Mühe / Paul Pfeiffer / Michael Wesely, The Extended Moment
- 03/16 Paul Pfeiffer, Three Figures in a Room
- 09/08 Paul Pfeiffer, Paul Pfeiffer
- 03/05 Paul Pfeiffer, Pirate Jenny
- 11/03 Paul Pfeiffer, Morning after the Deluge
Biography
Texts
- Christopher Knight: Review: With sports and horror movies as canvas, an artist dissects the world’s digital upheaval, Los Angeles Times, November 2023
- Juliana Halpert: Paul Pfeiffer’s “Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom”, e-flux Criticism, December 2023
- Timothy Anscombe-Bell: Paul Pfeiffer's digital image manipulations in LA dissect celebrity culture, Wallpaper Magazine, December 2023
- Liz Hirsch: Paul Pfeiffer’s Retrospective Shows How Spectacles Have Become Our Culture’s New Religion, artnews.com, January 2024