Dieter Jung Germany, b. 1941

Dieter Jung was born in 1941 in Bad Wildungen, Germany. He studied Fine Arts at the Berlin University of the Arts from 1963 to 1968, followed by experimental film at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin from 1971 to 1974. He also studied theology, painting, graphic arts, and cinema in Berlin and Paris — a breadth of formation that would prove foundational to a practice spanning multiple disciplines and media.

Since 1965, Jung's visual installations have been presented in major international exhibitions across Europe, North America, Asia, and Latin America. His work engages light as both subject and material, using holography not as a technical novelty but as a means of extending painting into three-dimensional space and time. The holographic cycle LightMills, developed during his years at MIT, remains one of his most celebrated bodies of work — a series in which light appears to rotate and pulse within the image plane, collapsing the distinction between the static and the kinetic. His paintings and drawings function in close dialogue with these holographic works, sharing the same preoccupation with luminosity, color, and perceptual transformation.

Jung's institutional affiliations have been central to his practice. From 1985 to 1989 he was a Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, working in connection with the Spatial Imaging Group at the MIT Media Lab. From 1990 to 2007 he served as Professor for Artistic Holography and Light Art at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. From 1992 to 1996 he was a member of the board of trustees of the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. In 2010 he joined the Academic Advisory Board of the ZERO Foundation in Düsseldorf, and in 2011 became a member of the International György Kepes Society in Hungary. His awards include the Shearwater Foundation Award (1988 and 2003), a Rockefeller Fellowship at CAVS/MIT (1985/86), and grants from the MIT Council for the Arts and the Cabin Creek Center for Work and Environmental Studies, New York.

Jung's works are held in major public collections across three continents, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; the MIT Museum, Cambridge; the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec; the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; the Kunsthalle Hamburg; the Kunsthalle Bremen; the Zentrum für Kunst und Medien (ZKM), Karlsruhe; the Taipei Fine Arts Museum; the Museu de Arte de São Paulo; the Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Tehran, among others.

His solo exhibition history includes presentations at the Kunsthalle Berlin (1991), the Musée de Québec (1985), the Museum of Holography in New York (1985), the Paris Art Center (1988), the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2005), the Zendai Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai (2006), the Today Art Museum and the Imperial City Art Museum in Beijing (2007 and 2011), and the Zentrum für Kunst und Medien in Karlsruhe (2019). Group exhibitions have brought his work to the 54th Venice Biennale (2011), the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, the Vasarely Museum in Budapest, and the Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Art, among many others.

Dieter Jung is represented by KORNFELD Galerie Berlin, which presented The Light Behind in 2024 and Life of Colorsin 2026 — two solo exhibitions that affirm his continued relevance as one of the most rigorous and visionary artists working with light and holography today.