Susanne Pfeffer

Susanne Pfeffer (* 1973 in Hagen ) is a German art historian and curator . She has been director of the Museum of Modern Art (MMK) in Frankfurt am Main since 2018 .

Career

Susanne Pfeffer attended the Ruhr-Gymnasium Witten and studied art history with Horst Bredekamp at the Humboldt University in Berlin. She graduated in 2001 with a master's thesis on medieval art. In the same year she became an exhibition assistant to Udo Kittelmann at the Kölnischer Kunstverein , where she collaborated on the presentation of Gregor Schneider's work Totes Haus ur at the 2001 Venice Biennale, among other things . In 2002 Kittelmann became director of the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt am Main, where Pfeffer followed him as an assistant.

In 2004 she was appointed artistic director of the Künstlerhaus Bremen . From January 2007 to December 2012 Susanne Pfeffer was chief curator of Kunst-Werke Berlin and since June 2013 director of the Museum Fridericianum in Kassel . On January 1, 2018, Pfeffer - succeeding Susanne Gaensheimer - became director of the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt.

In 2009 she received an award from the US section of the AICA art critic association for her exhibition Kenneth Anger at MoMA PS1 . In 2016, Pfeffer received the first curator award from the art magazine ART . Her exhibition Inhuman (2015) was honored. "The show astutely examines how people change through inhuman technology," said the jury in the reasoning.

Pfeffer was appointed honorary professor in the art department at the Offenbach am Main University of Design on January 1, 2019 . She teaches in the field of exhibition and communication of contemporary art.

In addition to numerous voluntary commitments, she is also a member of the jury for the Kurt Schwitters Prize , the Böttcherstrasse Art Prize and the Schering Foundation Art Prize, as well as curatorial advisor to MoMA PS1 in New York.

So far she has curated more than 60 exhibitions. Pfeffer is the editor of numerous artist monographs and exhibition catalogs.

Curatorial work

Bremen

In 2004 she was appointed artistic director of the Künstlerhaus Bremen. There she showed numerous solo and group exhibitions. Some of Pfeffer's “new discoveries” had their first institutional exhibition here, such as Matthias Weischer with Simultan , Emily Jacir with Woher wirommen , David Zink Yi with Alrededor del dosel / bypassing the treetops and Jonathan Monk with Ocean Wave (all 2004). She also presented the film pioneers Hans Richter with Der absolute Film (2005) and Kenneth Anger with Pleased to meet you (2006). She curated group exhibitions such as Bremer Freiheit with works by, among others, Olaf Nicolai , Thomas Rentmeister and Gregor Schneider, Not a Drop but the Fall based on an exhibition concept by Elmgreen & Dragset, or nothing more than a rendezvous with contemporary variations of the ready-made .

In May 2006, Susanne Pfeffer curated the exhibition German Wall Pieces for the Bolzano Museum Museion , in which frescoes and wall works by Ulla von Brandenburg , Katharina Grosse, Frank Nitsche, Gregor Schneider, Norbert Schwontkowski, Dirk Skreber and Matthias Weischer were shown. She invited the artists to South Tyrol for three weeks to work in the regional tradition of wall painting “al fresco”. In September 2007 she curated The history of a decade that has not yet been named by the artist Annette Kelm for the 9th Biennale d'art contemporain de Lyon .

Berlin

From January 2007 to December 2012 Susanne Pfeffer was - as successor to Anselm Franke - chief curator of Kunst-Werke Berlin . Among other things, she showed the Joe Coleman exhibitions . Internal Digging (2007), ... 5 minutes later (2008) with contributions by Robert Barry, Martin Boyce, Ulla von Brandenburg, Thomas Demand , Hans-Peter Feldmann , Douglas Gordon , Annette Kelm, Thomas Rentmeister and Andreas Slominski , shooting Mommartzfilm . Lutz Mommartz (2008) and the joint exhibition with Ricarda Roggan ( Still Life ), Albrecht Schäfer ( Winds and Windings ) and Richard Serra ( Thinking on Your Feet ). The ongoing exhibition project Hotel Marienbad 01–10 (2008–2010) also ran. In 2011, Pfeffer showed a solo exhibition by Cyprien Gaillard under the title The Recovery of Discovery . Artforum chose the exhibition as one of the “Best of 2011”. Pfeffer dedicated the first comprehensive solo exhibition to the artist Absalon . The exhibition was then also shown in the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum (2012).

kassel

From 2013 to the end of 2017 Pfeffer was director of the Fridericianum in Kassel . There she showed the exhibition trilogy Speculations on Anonymous Materials (2013), nature after nature (2014) and Inhuman (2015). She dedicated the world's first comprehensive retrospective to the American experimental filmmaker Paul Sharits . Other individual presentations showed works by the British artist Helen Marten and Tetsumi Kudo . On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the documenta , Pfeffer curated a retrospective of the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers .

Venice: Swiss Pavilion

In 2015 she became curator of the Swiss Pavilion at the Venice Biennale , where she showed works by the Swiss-German artist Pamela Rosenkranz . Rosenkranz and Pfeffer had already worked closely together in 2013 for the Speculations on Anonymous Materials exhibition at the Fridericianum.

Venice: German pavilion and award with the Golden Lion

Susanne Pfeffer curated the German contribution to the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. She invited the Frankfurt artist Anne Imhof to develop Faust especially for the German Pavilion . The resulting work, entitled Faust , was composed of a room installation, painting, sculpture and performance. The pavilion was awarded the Golden Lion as the best national contribution. The jury praised the fact that Faust is “a powerful and at the same time disturbing installation that asks pressing questions about our time and puts the viewer in a state of fear.” Furthermore, “Anne Imhof's work is an impressive reaction to the architecture of the pavilion , a work that is characterized by precise artistic decisions about objects, images, bodies and sound. "

Fonts (selection)

• (as ed.) Paul Sharits . Koenig Books, London 2015, ISBN 978-3-86335-681-1 .
• (as ed.) Speculations on Anonymous Materials . Merve, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-88396-358-7 .
• Absalon . König, Cologne 2001, ISBN 978-3-86560-952-6 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Susanne Pfeffer in the catalog of the German National Library
• Susanne Pfeffer with "Curators from Germany" at the Goethe-Institut
• Frankfurter Allgemeine from May 7, 2018: Modern Art in Frankfurt: Dizzying Views , by Michael Hierholzer

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Michael Vaupel: The icing on the cake for Wittenerin , DerWesten , February 10, 2014
2. ↑ Magister 2001 at Bredekamp - Susanne Charlotte Pfeffer: The appendix of the Codex Ser.n. 2639 from the National Library Vienna
3. ↑ zer: Frankfurt: Susanne Pfeffer is to head the MMK in the future. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. September 29, 2017. Retrieved October 1, 2017 . 
4. ↑ AICA Names Exhibitions of the Year In: artforum.com , accessed January 12, 2018.
5. ↑ Press portal from April 15, 2016: Susanne Pfeffer is the first recipient of the ART curator award (ots) , accessed on April 17, 2016
6. ↑ Katja Kupfer: Susanne Pfeffer appointed honorary professor at the HfG Offenbach. In: hfg-offenbach.de. February 4, 2019, accessed March 24, 2019 . 
7. ↑ Kurt Schwitters Prize In: nsks.de , accessed on January 12, 2018.
8. ^ Art Prize of Böttcherstraße in Bremen ( Memento from January 19, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
9. ↑ Juliane Sattler-Iffert: (k) KulturMagazin . Printec Offset; Issue 237, Volume 24, 2018, pp. 16–17.
10. ^ Website Künstlerhaus Bremen
11. ^ Exhibition catalog: German wall pieces, Edizioni Charter, Milan 2006.
12. ↑ 00s - The history of a decade that has not yet been named ( Memento from January 19, 2016 in the web archive archive.today )
13. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from March 9, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
14. ^ Exhibition archive Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen ( Memento from October 21, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
15. ↑ Website Fridericianum ( Memento of the original from June 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
16. ↑ Susanne Pfeffer curates the Swiss pavilion - the "Salon Suisse" in the Palazzo Trevisan deals with Dada In: prohelvetia.ch , accessed on January 12, 2018.
17. ↑ German Pavilion 2017. Retrieved on August 10, 2017 (English). 
18. ↑ ^{a b} La Biennale di Venezia - Premi della 57. Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on August 10, 2017 ; accessed on August 10, 2017 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.