Univ.-Prof.
Agnes Scherer
MA
Agnes Scherer is a visual artist and university professor of painting at the University Mozarteum Salzburg. With her elaborate operettas and narrative installations, she creates complex situations in which pictorial works elude immediate objectification and commodification and instead, through their interplay, demand bodily presence and an active mental assembling of the aesthetic experience as well as the levels of statement contained therein. She is also involved as a curator and author of art historical texts.
Agnes Scherer, *1985, studied Art History, Classical Archaeology and European Ethnology at the Universities of Tübingen and Vienna, as well as Liberal Arts and Sociology of Art at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Complementing her artistic practice, she worked as a dramaturg with Sasha Waltz in 2018-2020 and was a research assistant to Isabelle Graw at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste / Städelschule Frankfurt from 2019-2021. In 2021, Scherer was appointed to the professorship of painting at the University Mozarteum Salzburg. In her art practice, she develops independent exhibition formats by inscribing paintings and painted sculpture into holistic framing situations, thus focusing less on the individual artwork and more on a theatrical cross-reference between the objects. In terms of content, Scherer's artistic work repeatedly returns to the questioning of power relations and their underlying psychodynamics. Based on anthropological, art historical, and cultural historical research, Scherer often takes up artistic strategies that served to consolidate power in their original historical contexts in order to reuse them with critical caprice.
Agnes Scherer's exhibition activities in recent years include solo presentations at Kunstverein Düsseldorf (2021), Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich (2020); Langer Donnerstag, Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2017);
2019: Berlin Art Prize
2016: Young Artist Prize der Kunststiftung NRW
2015: Nigel Greenwood Art Prize und Residency
Works by Agnes Scherer are in public collections, including the KOLUMBA Museum, Cologne; Kunsthaus NRW Kornelimünster, Aachen; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm.
2022:
*Still Untitled*, curated in collaboration with Paris-based Galerie Sans Titre at Projektraum Pina, Vienna.
2020:
Von vielköpfigen Monstern und gestaltloser Gewalt, Claudia Barth, curated by Agnes Scherer, Projektraum sonnundsolche, Düsseldorf.
In the tame beast's eye: a grotto, curated by Agnes Scherer, (Brunhilde Groult; Tom Hardwick-Allan, Paul DD Smith), Galerie Zarinbal Khoshbakht, Cologne
2022
Jan Verwoert: "Fabel vom abgeschöpften Leben - Jan Verwoert über Agnes Scherer im Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen Düsseldorf", Texte zur Kunst, Heft 125 (März 2022), 213-216.
2021
“Wie die Künstler des Barock interessiert Scherer weniger die Improvisation, sondern “das ganz Elaborierte”, Elke Buhr, Monopol, Mai 2021, 76-78.
2020
Steven Warwick: “School’s out forever: On Agnes Scherer’s Operetta ‘The Teacher’”, Texte zur Kunst, Heft 120 (Dezember 2020), 92-94.
Lena von Tijen: “I’m interested in all forms of object theatre as a way to lend artifacts agency”, Metropolis M, 6 November 2020, online.
Sif Lindblad: “IN REAL LIFE THERE IS NO REWARD – Review of ‘Coeurs Simples’, a solo show by Agnes Scherer’”, 26 October 2020, on Arts of the Working Class, online.
Philippe Dagen: “Sélection galerie: Agnes Scherer à la galerie Sans Titre (2016)”, Le Monde, 2 October 2020.
2019
Donna Schons: “Gewinner des sechsten Berlin Art Prize stehen fest”, 16 September 2019, Monopol Online.
“Agnes Scherer: ORLANDO TUSSAUD” by Steven Warwick, Critic’s Picks, Artforum, Online.
“Puppet Politics: Artist Agnes Scherer’s Pastiche of Pantomime Power” by Stanton Taylor, 22 May 2019, on Frieze, Online.