Comprehensive biography of the artist

Hans Haacke

1936
Hans Haacke is born in Cologne on August 12 and grows up in Bad Godesberg.

1956-60
Studies at the Staatliche Werkakademie Kassel (State Art Academy), now the Kunsthochschule Kassel (Art Academy), under Stanley William Hayter, Marie-Louise von Rogister, and Fritz Winter, among others.

1959
Arnold Bode arranges a working student position for Haacke at documenta 2, where he photographs the visitors in front of artworks (Photographic Notes, documenta 2, 1959). In the same year, he visits an exhibition by Otto Piene for the first time in Bonn and establishes contact with him.

1960
Graduates from the art academy, which has just been renamed the Staatliche Hochschule für bildende Künste Kassel (State University of Fine Arts), with the first state examination in art education. A scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) enables Haacke to spend a year in Paris, where he attends and works at „Atelier 17“—an art school for experimental printmaking founded by Stanley William Hayter.

1961
Haacke attends the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia on a Fulbright Scholarship.

1962
During his one-year stay in Philadelphia, Haacke meets Jack Burnham, whose systems theory has a decisive impact on him. Haacke then moves to New York City for a year, where he exhibits at George Wittenborn’s One-Wall Gallery on Madison Avenue. In this year, Haacke participates in an exhibition with the Düsseldorf-based ZERO group of artists for the first time—titled NUL 1962 and presented at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam—where he showed plexiglass works and reliefs. By 1965, Haacke will have taken part in a total of ten exhibitions with the ZERO group in Italy, the Netherlands, Great Britain, the United States, and Germany.

1963
In August, Haacke takes a bus to Washington, DC, to attend the civil rights movement’s March on Washington where Martin Luther King made his most famous speech. In early September, Haacke returns to Cologne since his two-year student visa could not be extended. He then teaches at the Pädagogische Hochschule Kettwig (College of Education), the fashion school in Düsseldorf (as Otto Piene’s successor), and at other institutions.

1963-67
Haacke develops the Condensation Cube in a smaller (1963–65) and a larger version (1963–67).

1965
His first solo exhibition in Germany, titled Wind und Wasser, is presented at Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf. In November, Haacke returns to New York, where he resides permanently from then on.

Hans Haacke with his Wave sculpture, 1965

Rudi Blesh papers, ca. 1980–83, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

1966-67
Haacke teaches at the University of Washington in Seattle, Douglas College at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and the Philadelphia College of Art, among others. In January 1966, his first solo exhibition at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York takes place under the title Wind and Water. In October 1967, he opens a solo exhibition at MIT’s Hayden Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which was recreated in 2011 under the title HANS HAACKE 1967. From 1967 on, he first teaches as a lecturer, then becomes a professor of art at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York. His students include the artists Walter Dahn and Jiří Georg Dokoupil.

1968
Biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy publishes his General System Theory, which has a lasting impact on Haacke’s engagement with systems theories.

1969
On January 13, his eldest son Carl Samuel Selavy is born. Haacke documents this with the multiple Newborn Identification (Collaboration Linda & Hans Haacke). In spring, he takes part in the group exhibition Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form (Works – Concepts – Processes – Situations – Information) at Kunsthalle Bern, curated by Harald Szeemann. In the same year, Haacke refused to participate in the São Paulo Biennial due to the establishment of the military dictatorship in Brazil. He then became a cofounder and active member of the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC) in the fall of 1969. In light of the Vietnam War and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Haacke starts to feel a more urgent need to connect his work to society.

1970
For the group exhibition Information at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Haacke develops a survey of museum visitors, his MoMA Poll, which actively integrates social issues for the first time. He also takes part in the exhibition Software at The Jewish Museum, New York.

1971
Haacke is invited to do a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. However, the work he realizes for it—Shapolsky et al. Manhatten Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971—leads the director Thomas Messer to cancel the exhibition shortly before it opens. It would take fifteen years for Haacke’s works to be shown again in a US museum. In Cologne, Galerie Paul Maenz opens with a solo show by Hans Haacke. From this year on, the artist uses the contract drafted by Seth Siegelaub, the „Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement,“ for the sale of his art. This contract form is the first to stipulate the artist’s approval for the future use of the artwork, as well as the financial royalties on resale profits to be paid to the artist and their gallery.

1972
Haacke takes part in documenta 5 in October, followed by a solo exhibition at Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld in November. There he shows the installation Rhine Water Purification Plant.

1973
Haacke receives a scholarship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He presents his first solo exhibition at the John Weber Gallery in New York, which will represent him in the future. Haacke teaches as a visiting professor at the Hochschule für bildende Künste (University of Fine Arts) in Hamburg.

1974
The Manet-PROJEKT'74 submitted for the anniversary exhibition of the Wallraf Richartz Museum in Cologne is rejected. On the day of the show’s press opening, Haacke’s work is presented at Galerie Paul Maenz instead, using a facsimile of Édouard Manet’s Bunch of Asparagus. Following this censorship, the work’s first institutional presentation is in the exhibition Art Into Society – Society Into Art at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London.

1976
Haacke participates in the Venice Biennale for the first time.

1978
Scholarship from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the only federal funding organization for culture in the United States.

1979
Visiting professor at the Gesamthochschule Essen (Comprehensive University).

1981
For the large-scale exhibition Westkunst curated by Laszlo Glozer and Kasper König, Haacke conceives The Chocolate Master, a work about the influential Cologne collector Peter Ludwig. The curators decide not to present the work, which is then shown parallel to the exhibition at Galerie Paul Maenz in Cologne instead.

1982
Haacke participates in documenta 7 in Kassel.

1984
Exhibition Nach allen Regeln der Kunst at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein nbK in Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Kreuzberg, Berlin, right next to the Berlin Wall.

1987
Haacke’s works are exhibited at documenta 8.

1988
For the steirischer herbst festival, Hans Haacke realizes the installation And You Were Victorious After All in the city center of Graz: he reconstructs the obelisklike form which the National Socialists had used to cover the city’s Marian column in 1938 as a kind of „victory monument.“ Fifty years thereafter, Haacke dedicates it to the victims of the Nazi terror regime. Shortly before the end of the exhibition, neo-Nazis carry out an arson attack on the much-discussed work.

1991
He receives the Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement by the College Art Association of America and is granted the Association of German Critics’ art award for 1990 in the same year, as well as an honorary doctorate in fine arts from Oberlin College, Ohio.

1993
Haacke realizes the spectacular installation GERMANIA in the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, a field of rubble in reference to the building’s role under National Socialism and as a commentary on Germany’s reunification. Together with Nam June Paik, he receives the Biennale’s Golden Lion for this work.

1994
Visiting professor at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg (University of Fine Arts).

1997
Haacke takes part in documenta 10 in Kassel. He teaches as a Regents’ Lecturer at the University of California in Berkeley and receives the Art Award of the Kurt Eisner Foundation.

1998
Honorary doctorate from the Bauhaus Universität Weimar.

2000
After intensive debates in the Bundestag, Haacke installs the work TO THE POPULATION in the northern atrium of the Reichstag building in Berlin.

2001
For his first solo exhibition in Austria at the Generali Foundation, the artist develops the installation Mia san Mia (We Are Who We Are), which is shown together with earlier works on the politics of history and identity construction in a local context. Haacke receives the Helmut Kraft Foundation’s Prize for Fine Arts

2002
The College Art Association honors him with the Distinguished Teaching of Art Award.

2004
Haacke’s work is distinguished with the Peter Weiss Prize of the City of Bochum.

2005
Haacke has his first exhibition at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, which has represented him ever since.

2006
Haacke is honored at the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg and the Akademie der Künste in Berlin with the two-part retrospective Hans Haacke: Wirklich – Werke 1959–2006 / for real – Works 1959–2006, and receives the Roland Prize for Art in Public Space that same year.
2008 Honorary doctorate from the San Francisco Art Institute.

2015
With the “Fourth Plinth commission” at Trafalgar Square in London, Haacke is awarded one of the world’s most prestigious public art commissions and develops the Gift Horse for it.

2016
Honorary doctorate from the Maryland Institute College of Art.

2017
Haacke’s oeuvre is recognized with the Roswitha Haftmann Foundation’s Art Prize, the most highly endowed art prize in Europe.

2020
Haacke is awarded the prestigious Kaiserring art award by the City of Goslar.