Gregor Schneider (b. 1969, Rheydt) is a conceptual artist whose practice examines architecture as a social, psychological, and cultural structure. Working across installation, sculpture, photography, and film, Schneider addresses how spaces are produced, inhabited, and regulated, and how built environments shape perception, memory, and behavior. His work occupies a central position within contemporary debates on site-specificity, institutional frameworks, and the relationship between art and lived space.
Since the mid-1980s, Schneider has pursued a sustained artistic inquiry into the house as both a physical form and a symbolic construct. This long-term approach has established him as a key figure at the intersection of sculpture and architecture, where spatial experience becomes a medium through which broader questions of authorship, use, and power are articulated. Rather than treating architecture as a neutral container, his practice foregrounds space as an active, historically and politically charged agent.
Schneider represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 2001, where he was awarded the Golden Lion. His work has since been presented in major institutional contexts worldwide, including the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1998), Neue Nationalgalerie (2004), MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst (2004), K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (2007), MACRO (2008), Kunstmuseum Bochum (2014), MACBA (2017), and the Hamburger Kunsthalle (2018). His work is included in numerous international public collections.
In 2023, Schneider received the Ernst Franz Vogelmann Prize for his contribution to the history of sculpture and his life’s work. He has held a professorship in sculpture at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf since 2016 and has worked with Konrad Fischer Galerie since 1993.
Schneider lives and works in Rheydt, Germany.