Kurt Hentschlager

Education and early career

From 1982–85, Hentschlager studied at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna under Peter Weibel. He began to exhibit his work in 1983, building surreal machines and then video, computer animation, and sound works. In the early stages of his career, he also worked under the name Kurt Kitzler.

Granular-Synthesis

In 1991 in Vienna, Hentschlager and German artist Ulf Langheinrich co-founded the duo Granular-Synthesis. The name refers to the technique of granular synthesis, which Hentschlager and Langheinrich applied to both sound and image. Their multimedia installations and performances included Modell 5 (1994), Areal (1997), Noisegate (1998) and Pol (1998). They toured worldwide, and several compilations of their works were released on DVD. They won the International Biennial competition in Nagoya, Japan, in 1995, as well as stipends in Austria and the United States.

Themes

Hentschlager has described his installations as "visceral and immersive". A recurring topic in his work is the human body; human expression; the way the brain processes the outside world; and how perception is colored by imagination and one's individual psychology. Toward this end, he follows research in psychology and neurology as well as in contemporary art and culture. His current work focuses on nature and artifice from a post-utopian, post-science-fiction perspective.

Exhibitions and awards

Hentschlager's works have been exhibited at the Venice Biennale; the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; MoMA PS1 in New York; the Musée d'art contemporain de Montreal; the Museum of Applied Arts Vienna; the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe; the National Museum of China in Beijing; the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul; the NTT InterCommunication Center in Tokyo; the Laboratoria Arte Alameda in Mexico City; the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, Australia; and Art Basel in Basel, Hong Kong, and Miami Beach. He was an exhibiting artist at Eyebeam in 2005 and is currently a full-time visiting artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

He has received many awards and commissions, including the Qwartz New Media Art Award in 2010 in Paris, the File Prix Lux in São Paulo, the Austrian Federal State Grant for Media Art, and the Chicago Studio Grant. In 2012, he was commissioned as part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad to create Core, a symphonic installation.