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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 image renders athletes 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 2011, he was the subject of a retrospective at Sammlung Goetz in Munich, Germany.  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; and MoMA, New York. 

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