PAUL PFEIFFER

Early Years

Born in Honolulu, Pfeiffer spent much of his early life in the Philippines, before moving back to the United States. After completing a BFA at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1987, Pfeiffer moved to New York, where he now lives and works. He completed an MFA at Hunter College in 1994, and later participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Programme from 1997 to 1998.

In 2000, Pfeiffer’s early work, Fragment of a Crucifixion (After Francis Bacon) (1999), won him the Whitney’s first Bucksbaum Award. Referencing Francis Bacon‘s 1944 crucifixion triptych, the work presented a scene from a televised basketball game, in which many of the players are rendered as ghostly figures.

Paul Pfeiffer Artworks

Paul Pfeiffer’s audiovisual installations combine video, photography, sculpture, and sound, using custom-modified screens and projectors built from outdated technology to present altered footage from sports, concerts, publicity images, and game shows, where he isolates and intensifies moments of mass media spectacle by digitally subtracting or “camouflaging” key visual information.

In his ongoing photographic series Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2000–2018), Pfeiffer reworks publicity and NBA images by masking out contextual details such as other players, jersey numbers, and branding, leaving a lone, often anonymous figure suspended within a seething crowd—a strategy he has described not as erasure but as camouflage. This approach extends to video pieces like John 3:16 (2000), where 5,000 frames of a televised basketball game are digitally edited so that only the ball and the players’ hands remain, forcing viewers to track its frantic movement on a miniature LCD screen. In the long-running video series Caryatid (2003–ongoing), sports footage is shown on modified retro televisions; in one work, Pfeiffer removes the hockey players from a Stanley Cup victory so the trophy appears to float above the crowd, while later works depict boxers staggering as if hit by invisible opponents. Beyond sport, he applies the same meticulous post-production to footage of Michael Jackson onstage or contestants on The Price Is Right, using digital alteration to push familiar figures and formats toward something uncanny and more-than-human.

Awards and Accolades

Pfeiffer’s art has earned him various accolades, including the Whitney Museum of American Art‘s Bucksbaum Award (2000), The Alpert Award in the Arts in Visual Arts (2009), and fellowship with the American Academy in Berlin in 2011. His work features in major public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Guggenheim, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and MUSAC in León, Spain.

Exhibitions

Pfeiffer has been the subject of both solo exhibition and group exhibitions in important institutions.

Solo exhibitions include Desiderata, Perrotin, Paris (2018); Paul Pfeiffer: Screen Series, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2017); Paul Pfeiffer: Caryatids, Honolulu Museum of Art (2016); Vitruvian Figure, Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila (2015); Paul Pfeiffer: The Saints, Hamburger Bahnhof — Museum for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2009); and Morning after the Deluge, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2005).

Group exhibitions include Once Upon a Time Inconceivable, Protocinema, Istanbul (2021); Picture Industry: A Provisional History of the Technical Image, 1844—2018, LUMA, Arles (2018); The Beautiful Game, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2014); The Luminous Interval, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2011); The Gold Standard, MoMA P.S.1, New York (2006); Bitstreams, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2001); and Picturing Asia America: Communities, Culture, Difference, Houston Center for Photography, Houston, TX (1994).

Further Reading

In 2024, Ocula reviewed the artist’s extensive solo at MoCA’s Geffen building, Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom, which brought together monumental installations, roaring soundscapes, large-format photography, and tiny flickering films.

Paul Pfeiffer FAQs

Ocula | 2026