Paul Pfeiffer's first solo show in Asia

MANILA, Philippines - From 6 February to 16 April 2015 the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD) presents Vitruvian Figure, the first major solo museum show in Asia of artist Paul Pfeiffer. This marks the first time a presentation by a single artist will take over the entire MCAD space.

Pfeiffer works in a range of media as a means to examine the role mass media plays in shaping social consciousness. For his exhibition at MCAD Pfeiffer has produced several new, commissioned works to be shown alongside a number of older works. It will present a sampling of the breadth of Pfeiffer’s practice, including sculptures, video installations, and photographs, all of which are being shown in Asia for the first time.

The title Vitruvian Figure draws from Pfeiffer’s earlier sculptural works of the same name — in 2008, a large sculptural installation inspired by the Sydney Olympic Stadium, and in 2009, a sculptural synthesis of London’s Wembley Stadium and the Panathinaiko in Athens. For Pfeiffer, the stadium environment is a reflection of the larger social environment: a space built to engender mass hysteria as well as to contain and control. Pfeiffer, recognized for his deft use of scale in his practice, combines monumental and miniature forms as a foil for his uncanny observations on the media as a primary influence shaping contemporary consciousness and behavior.

Over the past six months Pfeiffer has been a visiting artist at the De la Salle-College of Saint Benilde’s Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, where he worked closely with the College’s students and faculty across all the degree courses towards the exhibition’s entire production.

Paul Pfeiffer was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, and raised in both the Philippines and the US. He has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art; MIT’s List Visual Arts Center; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Contemporary Museum, Honolulu; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; MUSAC Castilla y Leon, Spain; the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; The Project, NY; Thomas Dane Gallery, London; Carlier Gebauer Gallery, Berlin; and Paula Cooper Gallery, NY.

His numerous awards include a Fulbright-Hayes Fellowship to the Philippines (1994); the Bucksbaum Award from the Whitney Museum (2000); and the Alpert Award from CalArts (2009). The UK commissioning body Artangel invited him to produce the massive sound installation The Saints in 2007, and in 2014 the online work, Jerusalem. In 2011, he was the subject of a retrospective at Sammlung Goetz in Munich, Germany. Concurrent with his project at MCAD he is working on a project for Museo Madre, Naples (2015). His work is found in public and private collections around the world from the Guggenheim Museum and MoMA in New York, to the Centro Arte de Contemporanea Inhotim in Brazil.