Wolfgang Plöger (b. 1971 Münster) works across film, installation, printed matter, and sculpture, and through this practice continually reconsiders the production, circulation, and reception of images. He examines the shifting conditions of visibility in contemporary visual culture, addressing the entangled realities of analog and digital systems and how information is generated, mediated, and interrupted across material and technological frameworks.
Marked by conceptual clarity and formal restraint, his work often employs modest means to probe complex questions of perception, narrative structure, and the status of the image. Rather than treating images as stable carriers of meaning, Plöger foregrounds the processes by which they come into being and circulate, revealing the contingencies, repetitions, and gaps inherent in systems of representation.
A significant strand of his work interrogates the algorithmic organization of visual knowledge. In his long-running Google Image Search projects, Plöger translates the search results generated for specific terms directly into analog formats such as printed books and installation environments. By refraining from any editorial intervention and preserving the order produced by the algorithm, he exposes the automated logics through which Google’s search engine collects, sorts, and repeats images. In doing so, he raises questions about authorship, indexicality, and the ways in which collective memory and visual archives are constructed in digital culture.
Plöger frequently works with projection technologies, text, and translucent or light-sensitive materials, reconfiguring the relationship between object, image, and architectural space. Installations may suspend film stills, screens, and fragments of narrative in a state of temporal delay, prompting viewers to navigate between reading and viewing, recognition and doubt. In this way, his works operate as experiments in perception, investigating how memory and expectation shape the act of looking.
Plöger has presented solo exhibitions at institutions including Heidelberger Kunstverein, Heidelberg (2018); Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden; Kunstverein Langenhagen (2011); and Künstlerhaus Bremen (2009), as well as at Galerie Nelson-Freeman, Paris (2010). He has also held numerous solo exhibitions at Konrad Fischer Galerie in Düsseldorf and Berlin, and presentations at Georg Kargl, Vienna, and Paolo Bonzano Gallery, Rome.
Plöger lives and works in Berlin.