Hans Haacke: Retrospective

The German-American artist Hans Haacke (b. 1936) counts as one of the most influential figures in contemporary art. From November 8, 2024, to February 9, 2025, the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt dedicates a comprehensive retrospective to the artist’s oeuvre from 1959 to the present. Haacke has shaped the development of political art like no other artist of his generation. His direct and theoretically concise works are simultaneously poetic, metaphorical, ecological, and in many respects extremely contemporary. Artistically, he has pursued a variety of strategies, becoming involved early on in the fields of ecology and natural sciences, drawing on approaches from the ZERO group, Minimalism, Conceptual Art, public art, and poster art, among others.

Sebastian Baden, director of the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, notes: “Hans Haacke is a legend of political Conceptual Art. With this retrospective, we’re presenting an artist whose work has had a major influence on contemporary art. As an artist’s artist, he is a role model for many current positions. His major themes of ecology, Institutional Critique, and democracy are also the central themes of the present. Haacke’s critical practice needs to be made accessible and communicated to a broad international audience. The artist is always concerned with involving viewers, inviting them to engage in critical debate, and sensitizing them to the diversity and freedom of opinion. The democratic potential of his oppositional work is especially relevant now, at a time when democracies around the world are at risk.”

As a central pioneer of Institutional Critique within Conceptual Art, his works examined orders or systems and presented them comparatively. The artist himself describes the world as a supersystem with countless subsystems, each of which is more or less influenced by the others. Systemic thinking, institutional critique, and democracy are the major themes running throughout Haacke’s oeuvre.

Ingrid Pfeiffer, curator of the exhibition, further remarks: “Looking at Hans Haacke’s early work in particular offers insights into an oeuvre which may seem heterogeneous at first glance. He uses systemic questions to combine different materials and techniques such as photography, objects, actions, or installations. Structural parallels run like a golden thread through his oeuvre. During various periods, he has interlinked physical, biological, and social systems to reveal structures and cycles. Haacke’s work is always rigorously political, but also poetic and humorous. This directness has led him to be disinvited from exhibitions several times. He consistently stood up for his convictions, which include the defense of democratic principles in particular.”

The Schirn is showing iconic early works from the 1960s, his influential real-time systems, pieces that invite public participation, as well as expansive (historical) political installations. With around seventy paintings, photographs, objects, installations, actions, posters, and a film, the exhibition illustrates how Haacke became one of the world’s most important and influential political artists for subsequent generations. In the publicly accessible rotunda, the Schirn presents Hans Haacke’s iconic Gift Horse (2014), which the artist developed for Trafalgar Square in London as part of the Fourth Plinth, one of the world’s most prestigious commissions for public art.

An exhibition by the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt in cooperation with Belvedere, Vienna.

A catalog Hans Haacke: Retrospective, edited by Ingrid Pfeiffer (Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt) and Luisa Ziaja (Belvedere 21, Vienna), with contributions by Sabeth Buchmann and Stephan Geene, Hubertus Butin, Theresa Dann-Freyenschlag, Cornelia Eisendle, Vanessa Joan Müller, Ingrid Pfeiffer, Ursula Ströbele, Luisa Ziaja, an interview with Paul Maenz and Gerd de Vries, and a joint foreword by the director of the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt Sebastian Baden and the general director of the Belvedere, Vienna, Stella Rollig has been published in a German-English edition.

Director: Sebastian Baden  / Curator: Ingrid Pfeiffer, Schirn Kunsthalle / Press contact: Johanna Pulz (Head of Press/Public Relations): presse [at] schirn.de, T +49 (0) 69 29 98 82 148. Press material here.