Michael Huey (artist)

Background

Huey was born in Traverse City, Michigan. He graduated from Amherst College in 1987 with a degree in German Studies. He has lived in Vienna since 1989, and received a master's degree in art history at the University of Vienna in 1999. He is married to the Viennese art historian Christian Witt-Dörring.

Alongside his artistic practice, Huey has also published extensively, first as a staff member of The Christian Science Monitor, and more recently as a memoirist writing at length about his family's roots in Chicago and Leelanau County, Michigan. He is a regular and longtime contributor to the London-based magazine The World of Interiors and has written frequently about art and design for exhibition catalogues, newspapers, and magazines in both Europe and the United States.

Work

Huey's artistic practice has been closely tied by critics to his interest in family history and inventories. A common technique of his is to re-photograph and re-use existing, vintage photos and papers. The arts magazine EIKON has written that Huey's works "are like news that reaches us from the past and are kept as poetry in time."

According to Artforum magazine, "Huey's process defamiliarizes...objects to the extent that they become alien, worthy of scrutiny."

Huey's images have been likened by The New Yorker to the work of early photography pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot.

Individual works by Huey have been displayed at the Kunsthalle Wien, the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna, the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, the Mead Art Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. In 2014 he joined the Secession, the Viennese artists’ association founded in 1897 by Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser, Josef Hoffmann, and Joseph Maria Olbrich, among others.

Solo exhibitions

Selected Group Shows

Publications

(Huey as author unless otherwise indicated)