Christiane Feser Germany, b. 1977

Christiane Feser was born in 1977 in Würzburg, Germany, and lives and works in Frankfurt am Main. From 1999 to 2006 she studied visual communication and photography at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach, where her principal teachers were Heiner Blum and Lewis Baltz. During her studies, from 2000 to 2003, she worked as a research associate on the Digitalcraft project at the Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt, an early engagement with the relationship between digital processes and material form that would inform the direction of her practice. She received her Art Diploma in 2006.

Feser's practice is rooted in photography but refuses to be contained by it. Her method begins with the construction of physical assemblages: folded paper, repeated geometric forms, layered surfaces, all carefully lit to produce complex plays of light and shadow. These assemblages are then photographed, and the resulting prints become raw material for a further stage of making: cutting, folding, re-sculpting, with pins placed or thread woven into the composition to create works that project three-dimensionally from the picture plane. The photograph is simultaneously flattened and expanded, collapsed into an object and opened back out into space. The resulting works occupy a territory between image and sculpture, between the indexical and the constructed, producing geometric landscapes and panoramas of vertiginous spatial complexity. Her practice combines a rigorous formal intelligence with a sustained inquiry into the nature of perception itself: how we read surfaces, how we navigate depth, and how the photographic image both reveals and conceals the physical world.

Feser has received extensive institutional recognition. Her awards include the Kaiserring Stipend of the Mönchehaus Museum Goslar (2012), the Ann Wolff Foundation Award (2013), the 1822 Art Award of the Frankfurter Sparkasse (2016), the Cité Internationale des Arts residency in Paris supported by the Hessian Ministry for Art and Science (2014), the Budapest Art Factory residency (2019), the Sommer Residenz D'Image Berlin (2018), and the Thinking Tools Residency at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp (2025). Her works are held in the permanent collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Zentrum für Kunst und Medien (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, the Fundación Juan March in Madrid, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the DZ Bank Kunstsammlung Frankfurt, the Kunstmuseum Bochum, the Mönchehaus Museum Goslar, the Museum im Kulturspeicher Würzburg, the CCPC-Cisnero Collection in New York, and the Fotografische Sammlung Schloss Kummerow.

Her exhibition history spans institutions across Europe and North America. Solo presentations include Accurate Illusionsat Gitterman Gallery, New York (2022), Relative Varianten at the Opelvillen, Rüsselsheim (2019), New Works at Von Lintel Gallery, Los Angeles (2018), and Consider the Sphere at Von Lintel Gallery (2017). Group exhibitions include Cut! Paper Play in Contemporary Photography at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2018), Das autonome Bild at the Kunstmuseum Bochum (2016), Walls of Power at the Arles Fotofestival (2019), PIN at the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2020), and Fabric of Dreams at the Museum Haus des Papiers, Berlin (2025). KORNFELD Galerie Berlin presented Christiane Feser in the solo exhibition Coded Echoes at 68projects, Berlin, in 2021, and at Paris Photo and ARCO Madrid in 2022.