Paul Pfeiffer (American, b. 1966) digitally edits and erases footage from sports broadcasts, films and concerts, removing players and performers to shift attention onto crowds, equipment and the machinery of spectacle.,He describes the resulting works, spanning video, sculpture, photography and installation, as “video sculptures”.,Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, he spent part of his childhood in the Philippines before relocating to New York in 1990.
Pfeiffer earned a BFA in printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1987 and later studied at Hunter College and the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program.,His 1999 work Fragment of a Crucifixion (After Francis Bacon) digitally edits a broadcast basketball game so that the players appear only as ghostly afterimages, while the crowd's reaction remains.The piece references a 1944 triptych by Francis Bacon and won Pfeiffer the Whitney Museum of American Art's inaugural Bucksbaum Award in 2000.,In Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse #10 (2004), he removed every competitor, logo and scoreboard from a photograph of a basketball player, leaving a single ambiguous figure venerated by the crowd around him.Other sculptures recreate props and sets from horror films such as Poltergeist, The Exorcist and The Amityville Horror using computer-generated models.
In 2002 he was an artist-in-residence at MIT and at ArtPace in San Antonio, and in 2003 a traveling retrospective of his work was organized by MIT's List Visual Arts Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.He is represented by Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, carlier | gebauer in Berlin, Galerie Perrotin in Paris and Thomas Dane Gallery in London.
His exhibition “Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom” was shown at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in Los Angeles from November 2023 and at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao from November 2024 to March 2025.,The show gathered around thirty works, pairing his sports and religious pieces with recent work addressing colonial legacies and identity.His work Red Green Blue was shown at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York from November 2022 to January 2023 and at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha from October 2025 to April 2026.In 2026 Pfeiffer became the inaugural artist-in-residence at Brooklyn's Barclays Center, leading a year-long media workshop with justice-impacted youth and adults alongside the artist Shaun Leonardo, supported by the arena's Social Justice Fund.
