Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom

The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago announces Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom, on view May 3 through August 31, 2025. Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom is a survey that covers 25 years of work from artist Paul Pfeiffer (b. 1966, Honolulu, Hawaii; lives in New York), whose practice interrogates ideas of spectacle, celebrity, and mass culture. The exhibition brings together works from across Pfeiffer’s career, spanning his early photo and video works to his latest experiments in sculpture and installation. Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom focuses on the artist’s use of media manipulation to reveal audiences’ participation in both adoration and objectification.

Mining imagery from our media-saturated world, Pfeiffer recontextualizes global icons such as pop stars, film actors, and athletes through careful acts of cutting, splicing, and masking. Throughout his work, Pfeiffer interrogates what it means to consume images and culture. For Pfeiffer, the basketball court, the boxing ring, and the stadium not only serve as platforms for grand spectacles but as sites where the body politic—of a nation, of a community, of society—is imagined, defined, and contested.

Spanning two and a half decades of work, the exhibition features Pfeiffer’s works in the MCA Collection, including Fragment of a Crucifixion (After Francis Bacon) (1999) and Self-Portrait as a Fountain (2000), which is part of the D.Daskalopoulos Collection Gift. This exhibition is the MCA’s fourth that centrally features Pfeiffer’s work, following his career-defining solo show Paul Pfeiffer in 2003, MCA Screen: Paul Pfeiffer in 2018, and Fragments of a Crucifixion in 2019. The accompanying catalogue for this exhibition includes an interview from Fragments of a Crucifixion between Pfeiffer and former MCA Marjorie Susan Curatorial Fellow Chanon Kenji Praepipatmangkol, and features contributions from University of Chicago Professor Emeritus Tom Gunning, artist Julie Mehretu, and historian Lawrence Chua.

Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and curated by Clara Kim, Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, and Paula Kroll, Curatorial Assistant. The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago presentation is curated by Bana Kattan, former Pamela Alper Associate Curator, with Iris Colburn, Curatorial Associate.