Guest of Honor: Stefan Gronert
“With a lot of enthusiasm, I am looking forward for the event of the “art meets science – Foundation Herbert W. Franke” in the Academy of Arts Berlin. My expectation is to learn more about a specific time and tendency in photo and media history which is still not in the focus of our discipline.
In the section “The 1950s and 1960s: From analog to digital Generative Art” I will point out the impact of photographers like Peter Keetman, Heinrich Heidersberger, and especially Gottfried Jäger who were responsible for the digitalization of photography with analogue tools: the avantgarde in German art of the 50s and 60s.”
Biography
Stefan Gronert, born in 1964, holds a doctorate in art history and has been curator for photography and media art at the Sprengel Museum Hannover since 2016. After his studies in art history, education, German language and literature, and philosophy in Bochum he was head of the graphic collection and curator of contemporary art at the Kunstmuseum Bonn from 1996. His numerous exhibitions focused on contemporary painting (Laura Owens, Mary Heilmann, Gerhard Richter etc.) as well as photography of the second half of 20th Century (US & Canadian photography, John Baldessari,Larry Sultan, Gottfried Jäger, Adrian Sauer etc.).
Stefan Gronert is author of numerous publications on modern and contemporary art, e.g. monographs on Gerhard Richter Portraits (2006) Richter’s editions (with Hubertus Butin, 2014), Sigmar Polke (2017), Jeff Wall (2016) and the Düsseldorf School of Photography (2009, 2nd edition: 2017). Stefan Gronert has held numerous teaching positions and in 2017 initiated the blog on the theory of photography (www.foto-kunst-theorie.de) of the Sprengel Museum Hannover.