ekaterina shapiro-obermair
Ekaterina Shapiro-Obermair is a visual artist, researcher, and curator. Between 1999 and 2009, she studied painting and sculpture in Nuremberg, Berlin, and Vienna, and works with a wide range of media, from video to installations. She has also been involved in several large-scale research projects and holds a doctorate in philosophy. Since 2017, she has been running the non-profit art space hoast in Vienna in collaboration with Wolfgang Obermair.
Ekaterina Shapiro-Obermair is interested in questions of memory, historiography, and ideology. Analytical seeing is her main tool for understanding the world around her, whether she encounters art objects or fragments from other realities. Although she is more interested in larger contexts than personal stories, her own biography often serves as a common thread running through her investigations. Many of Shapiro-Obermair's projects deal with or are inspired by the cultural space of her origins, which could be described as post-Soviet, e.g. the monograph „Geschichte preformen“ (2024), the film “de fac-to” (2018), the exhibition “Soviet Modernism 1955-1991. Unknown Stories” (2012), or the publication “The Great Moscow that Never Was” (2008).
She has exhibited in Austrian and international galleries, museums and institutions, such as museumkrems, Krems (2024), Belvedere 21 (2023), Vienna, Studio PRÁM (2023), Prague, Engländerbau, Vaduz (2022), Kunstverein Eisenstadt, Eisenstadt (2022), Ravnikar Gallery Space, Ljubljana (2020), Museum of Western and Oriental Art, Odesa (2019), Georg Kargl Permanent, Vienna (2019), Museum of Western and Oriental Art Odesa Ukraine (2019), Jewish Museum Vienna (2017, 2015), TAXISPALAIS – Kunsthalle Tirol, Innsbruck (2017, 2015), Ani Molnár Gallery, Budapest (2016), Ludwig Múzeum, Budapest (2014), Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow (2014), and Secession, Vienna (2010). She is a recipient of awards such as Theodor Körner Prize, Austria (2017), Chimera Art Award, Budapest (2015), and a grantee of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, New York (2014). Her dissertation was awarded the Prize of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna for the best academic work of the 2022 academic year.
© Wolfgang Obermair