Univ.-Prof.
Agnes Scherer
MA
Agnes Scherer is a visual artist and Professor of Painting at Mozarteum University Salzburg. Through elaborate operettas and narrative installations, she creates immersive situations in which paintings resist immediate objectification and commodification. Instead, their interplay invites embodied engagement and active interpretation, encouraging viewers to assemble the aesthetic experience and its multiple layers of meaning. She also works as a curator and author of art historical texts.
Agnes Scherer 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. Alongside her artistic practice, she worked as a dramaturg with Sasha Waltz from 2018 to 2020 and as a research assistant to Isabelle Graw at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste / Städelschule Frankfurt from 2019 to 2021. In 2021, she was appointed Professor of Painting at Mozarteum University Salzburg.
Scherer develops distinctive exhibition formats that place paintings and painted sculpture within immersive, carefully staged environments. Rather than foregrounding the individual artwork, these settings create theatrical relationships between objects, inviting viewers to experience the work as an interconnected whole.
Her artistic practice repeatedly examines power relations and their underlying psychodynamics. Drawing on anthropological, art historical and cultural-historical research, she reworks artistic strategies that originally served to consolidate power, recontextualising them with critical wit and irony.
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.