Biography
Since 2006, Nicolaus Schafhausen has been artistic and managing director of Witte de With
Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. He was appointed curator of the German
Pavilion at both the 52nd and 53rd Venice Biennial in 2007 and 2009.
Nicolaus Schafhausen, born in 1965 in Düsseldorf, lives in Brussels. Before starting his
career as curator in 1990, he worked as an artist. During this time, he studied art history
at the Berlin Technical University and at Munich’s Ludwig-Maximilians-University. In 1991 he
founded - along with artist Markus Schneider - the Lukas & Hoffmann gallery. He managed
the gallery until 1994, which was initially based in Berlin and then in Cologne. During those
three years, he organized, among others, the first exhibitions of artists who are now internationally
successful, for example Kai Althoff, Olafur Eliasson, Carsten Höller and Antje Majewski. From 1995
to 1998, he was artistic director of Künstlerhaus Stuttgart. In the form of the Umbauraum (conversion room),
he launched a model for mediating art that was to set the tone in similar institutions in the 1990s.
Exhibitions at the Künstlerhaus included Kai Althoff, Cosima von Bonin, Lukas Duwenhögger, Olafur Eliasson,
Liam Gillick, Morgan Fisher, Sharon Lockhart and Stephen Prina. In 1999, Schafhausen was appointed director
of Frankfurter Kunstverein, and he remained its artistic and managing director until 2005. Under his management,
the Frankfurter Kunstverein was repositioned nationally and internationally. The programme highlights of
the period were the thematic exhibitions he curated on contemporary social issues, with topics such as the
“local” (To the people of the city of the Euro), migration (You have to really learn a lot to function here)
and a trilogy on the phenomenon of globalization (Neue Welt, New Heimat, non-places). Shows such as the
panorama exhibition deutschemalereizweitausenddrei appealed to a broad audience. The exhibition to mark
the 100th anniversary of the birth of Theodor W. Adorno, titled Adorno. The Possibility of the Impossible
demonstrated Schafhausen’s desire to trigger discussion. His solo exhibitions included among others:
Michael Beutler, Gerard Byrne, Keren Cytter, Simon Debroey Møller, Christian Flamm, Isa Genzken, Liam Gillick,
Tue Greenfort, Jonathan Meese, Alex Morrison, Marcel Odenbach, Stephen Prina, Emilio Prini, Jozef Robakowski,
Markus Schinwald and Cerith Wyn Evans. In 2005, he was appointed founding director of the European Kunsthalle
in Cologne for a period of two years. This project explored models for a potential contemporary art institution
in Cologne. Within this framework, he curated the exhibitions Modelle für Morgen (Models for tomorrow) in the
city’s public space and Köln Show 2 in selected private galleries.
Since 2006, Schafhausen is director of Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam.
The renowned Dutch institution is an art center with a focus on theory and discussion. Currently
he is preparing solo exhibitions with Edith Dekyndt and Billy Apple as well as the large-scale,
thematic group shows Morality and Ethics (for further information see www.wdw.nl). In Rotterdam,
his emphasis is on team work and he was able to bring together an international team of curators as well as theorists.
Schafhausen has curated and co-curated various shows outside of his own institutions:
2005 Populism at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Center for Contemporary Art (CAC), Vilnius
and the National Museum for Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo; Bühne des Lebens - Rhetorik
des Gefühls, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Kunstbau, Munich (2006). In 2007, he presented
Isa Genzken at the German Pavilion of the Venice Biennial with Oil. In 2008 Schafhausen was
co-curator at the first Brussels Biennial. In 2010, he will curate the Platform Festival in Seoul, together with Sunjung Kim.
Nicolaus Schafhausen is a member of various private and public juries and advisory boards.
Since 2002, he has been a consultant to the DekaBank art collections as well as a Board member
of the Ursula Blickle Foundation. He was advisor to the state art collections of the Nord-Pas de
Calais, Frac, Dunkirk Departments (1999 to 2005) and consultant for the Lufthansa Aviation Center
along with Max Hollein (2004 to 2007). Since 2006, he has been a jury member of a number of
periodic international art awards, most recently the Prix de la Jeune Peinture in Brussels and t
he Hermes Korea Missulsang Award in Seoul, Korea. In 2007, together with colleagues from North-Rhine
Westphalia and the Benelux States, he co-founded the Comité van Roosendaal, a regional network with
the objective of art mediation in the region. Since 2008, Schafhausen has been a member of the
international advisory committee of the Mondriaan Foundation and a member of the advisory board
of Independent Curators International (iCI), New York
In 2003, Schafhausen was awarded the Hesse State Prize for Culture.