About the artist:
Wolfgang Staehle was born in Stuttgart, Germany in 1950. He attended the Freie Kunstschule in Stuttgart, and in 1976 he moved to New York to attend the School of Visual Arts, New York (BFA) where he studied closely with the Conceptual Artist Joseph Kosuth. Staehle has been living in New York since 1976, where he worked as a video artist. After a successful career in various New York in European galleries in the 1980s, Staehle decided to work collectively, and in 1991 he founded “The Thing,” an independent media online forum project for artists and cultural workers. The Thing began as a Bulletin Board System (BBS), a form of online community dialogue used before the advent of the World Wide Web, and became one of the seminal online and offline forums for new media art and theory. Staehle is now recognized as a pioneer of the internet art scene and since 1996, Staehle began to produce an ongoing series of live online video streams. The first of these works was Empire 24/7, a continuous recording of the top one-third of the Empire State Building that is broadcast live over the Internet, and which Effectively transcended technology into a somewhat Warholian update of the landscape genre. Staehle has followed Empire 24/7 with online streams of other buildings, landscapes and cityscapes such as Berlin's Fernsehturm, the Comburg Monastery in Germany, lower Manhattan before and after 9/11, and a Yanomami village in the Brazilian Amazon. He continues to expand this series while serving as the Executive Director of The Thing. One-Person Exhibitions: 2004 Postmasters Gallery, New York City. 2001 Postmasters Gallery, New York City. 2000 Kunstverein Schwaebisch Hall, Germany. 1996 "Installations Video," Art & Public, Geneva, Switzerland. 1993 "Point de Mire," Centre Pompidou, Paris, France. 1991 Massimo De Carlo Gallery, Milan, Italy. 1990 Marimura Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan. Galleri Wallner, Malmo, Sweden. Galerie Wilma Tolksdorf, Hamburg, Germany. Museum Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany (cat.). Kunsthalle Bremen, Bremen, Germany (cat.)." Daniel Buchholz Gallery, Cologne, Germany. Koury Wingate Gallery, New York. 1989 Galerie Sylvana Lorenz, Paris, France. The Kitchen, New York. Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT. 1988 T'Venster Museum, Rotterdam, Netherlands. "Requiem," The New Museum, New York. Daniel Newburg Gallery, New York. 1987 Daniel Newburg Gallery, New York. Selected Group Exhibitions: 2007 "Closed Circuit: Video and New Media at the Metropolitan," The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 2006 "Slow Life," curated By Yuu Takehisa, John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, Great Britain. "Dark Places," curated by Joshua Decter, Santa Monica Museum of Art (cat.). 2005 "The Forest," Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, NC (catalogue). "re:site montréal," Oboro, Montreal. "Vom Verschwinden," HMKV, Phoenix Halle, Dortmund. "Photography's Expanded Field," Preus Museum, Horten, Norway. "Video Sculpture in Germany," Apeejay Media Gallery, New Delhi (catalogue). 2004 "Time Zones," Tate Modern, London (catalogue.). "Midtown," real-time public video projection, Lumen, Leeds, Great Britain. "The Passage of Mirage," Chelsea Art Museum, New York. 2003 "Yanomami," curated by Bruce Albert, Fondation Cartier pour L'Art Contemporain, Paris, November 2002 - March 2003 (catalogue.). "Critical Conditions," Wood Street Galleries, Pittsburgh, PA. Curated by Timothy Druckrey (catalogue.). "Slowness," curated by Mercedes Vincente, Dorsky Curatorial Projects, Queens, NY. 2002 "Unknown Quantity," curated by Paul Virilio, Fondation Cartier pour L'Art Contemporain, Paris, November 2002 - March 2003 (catalogue.). "Monitor 2," Gagosian Chelsea, New York. "EMPIRE/STATE," Artists Engaging Globalization, Whitney Museum of American Art, Independent Study Program Exhibition at the Art Gallery of The Graduate Center, The City University of New York (cat.). "Outside the Box," curated by Margaret Miller and Jade Dellinger, University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, Florida. "Transmediale.02 ‹ Current Positions in Media Art," curated by Andreas Broeckmann, Susanne Jaschko, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany, February 5 24, 2002 (catalogue). 2001 "Tele[Visions]," curated by Joshua Decter, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria (including Vito Acconci, Michel Auder, Chris Burden, Maurizio Cattelan, Larry Clark, Thomas Demand, Martin Kippenberger, Miltos Manetas, Tony Oursler, Daniel Pflumm, Tobias Rehberger, Christoph Schlingensief, Olav Westfalen, and others), October 2001 January 2002 (catalogue). "Media Connection," curated by Gianni Romano, Onmitel MediaLab, Rome, Italy (including Nam June Paik, Bertrand Lavier, Jenny Holzer, Doug Aitken, Carsten Nicolai, Antonio Muntadas, Kazuo Miyajima, Matthew McCaslin, et al).
