bio

Norbert Schoerner (b.1966) is a Bavarian artist, photographer and filmmaker based in London, UK. Encompassing both artworks presented in solo museum exhibitions, and projects for some of the world’s most innovative fashion brands, his practice is characterized by a rigorous yet playful probing of the possibilities of the image in an age of unprecedented cultural and technological acceleration, and embodies what he has called ‘an ongoing exchange between craft and theory’. 

Schoerner’s earliest work appeared in the iconic British magazine The Face in the late 1980s, and since then his editorial photographs have featured in many of the world’s most influential publications. His ability to anticipate – and make – the cultural weather has seen him commissioned to create celebrated advertising campaigns.

In recent years, Schoerner’s work as a visual artist has been foregrounded in the major solo museum exhibitions ‘The Nature of Nature: Fukushima Project’ at the Museum Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt (2022) and ‘Gegenlicht’ at Haus de Fotografie, Burghausen (2020). These shows built on his long history of art photography and filmmaking, which has seen him present his work at galleries, public institutions and festivals including Fitzrovia Chapel, London (2021), Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (2017) and the Cannes International Film Festival (2014), and publish monographs and artist’s books including The Order of Things (Phaidon, 2002), Third Life (Violette Editions, 2012) and Pictures I Never Took (Antenne Books, 2017).  

Schoerner travelled to Japan for the first time in 1992 and has returned regularly ever since, often for several months at a time. He has an abiding fascination with Japanese ‘ways of seeing’, which cannot be fully apprehended within the framework of Western aesthetic vocabularies.  

One of the first photographers to experiment with digital post-production, and more recently A.I., Schoerner is deeply concerned not only with contested notions of ‘the real’, but also with the temporality and narrative potential of the image. As he has said, ‘a photograph should not be seen as a hermetic representation of a frozen moment, but a resonant vessel, with ever-expanding meaning’. 

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Selected exhibitions:

The Nature of Nature: Fukushima Project (Museum Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt, 2022), decoy (Fitzrovia Chapel, London, 2021), gegendlicht. (Haus der Fotografie, Burghausen, 2020), Beyond The Road (Saatchi Gallery, London, 2019), Never Ending Stories (Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 2017), Präsens (Jil Sander, Museum Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, 2017), Zeitraum (Tiefgarage Traunstrasse, Mühldorf, 2017), Nearly Eternal (Bookmarc, Tokyo, 2017), Daydreaming with: Stanley Kubrick (Somerset House, London, 2016), Third Life (Tsutaya T-Site, Tokyo, 2012)

Selected monographs: 

The Nature of Nature: Fukushima Project (Walter & Franz König, Berlin, 2022), Pictures I Never Took (Antenne Books, London, 2017), Nearly Eternal (Chance Publishing, London, 2016), Third Life (Violette Editions, London, 2012), Concise Dictionary of Dress (Violette Editions / Artangel / Victoria+Albert Museum, London, 2010), The Order of Things (Phaidon, London, 2001), Apocalypse (Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2000)