Since January 2006, Nicolaus Schafhausen
has been Director of the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in
Rotterdam, The Netherlands. In June 2005, he was appointed Founding Director
of the European Kunsthalle in Cologne for two years. This project explores
models for a potential contemporary art institution in Cologne. He is
Commissioner of the German Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007.
Nicolaus Schafhausen was born in 1965 in Düsseldorf, studied art
history at the Berlin Technical University and at Munich’s Ludwig
Maximilian University. Schafhausen initially wanted to become an artist
and then, while holding a scholarship at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in
Berlin in 1991, resolved, along with artist Markus Schneider to found
the Lukas & Hoffmann gallery. He managed the gallery until 1994 –
it was initially based in Berlin and then in Cologne. During those three
years, he realized, among others things, the first exhibitions of artists
who are now so internationally successful, namely Kai Althoff, Olafur
Eliasson, Carsten Höller and Antje Majewski. During this period he
started working freelance as a curator. From 1995 to 1998, he was Artistic
Director of Künstlerhaus Stuttgart. In the form of the “conversion
room,” he launched a model for communicating art that was to set
the tone in similar institutions in the 1990s. The symposium on “Art
and Art Communication in Central and Eastern Europe,” conceived
by him in 1997 in Stuttgart and organized jointly with Institut für
Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa) set standards in the critical discussions of
art in those regions. On behalf of the Weimar State Art Collections, together
with Klaus Biesenbach in 1996 he curated the show “after Weimar,”
the first institutional international group show of contemporary art in
East Germany after German reunification. In 1996, he was adviser to documenta
X.
In 1999, Schafhausen was appointed Director of Frankfurter Kunstverein,
and he remained its artistic and commercial director until December 2005.
Under his management, Frankfurter Kunstverein was repositioned nationally
and internationally. The programmatic highlights of the period were the
thematic exhibitions he launched on current social issues, namely on topics
such as the “local” (“To the people of the city of the
Euro”), on migration (“You have to really learn a lot to function
here”) and the trilogy on the almost unfathomable phenomenon of
globalization (“Neue Welt”, “New Heimat”, “Non-Places”).
Shows such as the panorama exhibition “deutschemalereizweitausenddrei”
served mass tastes. The exhibition to mark the 100th anniversary of the
birth of Theodor W. Adorno “Adorno. The Possibility of the Impossible”
is evident of Schafhausen’s desire to trigger discussion.
Nicolaus Schafhausen is a member of various private and public juries
and advisory boards. Since 2002 he is 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
Departements (1999 to 2005) and consultant for the Lufthansa Aviation
Center along with Max Hollein (2004 to 2007). Since 2006 he has been a
member of a number of periodic international art awards, latest once include
Prix de la Jeune Peinture jury in Brussels and the Hermes Korea Missulsang
Award in Seoul, Korea. In 2003, Schafhausen was awarded the Hesse State
Prize for Culture.
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