Known for his innovative manipulation of digital media, Paul Pfeiffer (b. 1966, Honolulu, Hawaii) recasts the visual language of pop spectacle to examine how images shape our perception of ourselves and the world. Sampling footage from YouTube, cable television, and other sources, he uses these as an occasion 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 — professional sports, televised game shows, Michael Jackson, etc. — to the long, seemingly remote histories of art, media, religion, politics, and nationhood.

He has had one-person exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2001), the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2003), the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2005), MUSAC León, Spain (2008), the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2009), the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas (2012), Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila (2015), the Honolulu Museum of Art, Hawaii (2016), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2017), the Bellas Artes Outpost, Manila (2018)—and was the subject of a retrospective at Sammlung Goetz in Munich, Germany (2011). Pfeiffer’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Inhotim Museu de Arte Contemporanea, Brazil; the Pinault Collection, Venice; and Kunst Werke, Berlin.

Recent projects include a commission by Performa 2019 that was presented at Harlem’s Apollo Theater, and upcoming is a curatorial project titled Exodus in the Watergate Building in Washington D.C. He currently lives and works in NYC and Manila.