Paul Pfeiffer

Paul Pfeiffer is an artist living and working in New York City, who has been making work in video, photography, installation, and sculpture since the late 1990s. Known for his innovative manipulation of digital media, Pfeiffer recasts the visual language of mass media spectacle to examine how images shape our awareness of ourselves and the world. Sampling footage from YouTube and other sources, he uses these to plumb the depths of contemporary culture, assessing its racial, religious, and technological dimensions. At the same time, Pfeiffer's objects and images function diachronically, establishing profound genealogies that connect contemporary culture and its many particularities to the long, seemingly remote histories of art, media, religion, and human consciousness.

Pfeiffer has had many one-person exhibitions at Whitney Museum of American Art (2001); the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2003 and 2017-18); the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2005); MUSAC León, Spain (2008); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2009); Sammlung Goetz, Munich (2011); Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila (2015); Inhotim, Brumadinho, Brazil (2018); and The Athenaeum, Athens, GA (2023). He has presented work in major international exhibitions, most recently the Performa Biennial and the Honolulu Biennial in 2019 and the Toronto Biennial and Seoul Mediacity Biennale in 2022. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; M+, Hong Kong; The Guggenheim; Tate Modern; and the Pinault Collection, among many others.

The first large-scale retrospective of his work in the U.S. opens at The Geffen Contemporary at LA MOCA in November 2023.