Gregor Schneider

Gregor Schneider was born on 5 April 1969 in Rheydt, Germany, now part of Monchengladbach-Rheydt, where he still lives and works. He began the work that would become "Haus u r" in the mid-1980s, while still in his teens, a house he has continued to rebuild, wall by wall and room by room, for the rest of his career. He studied art from 1989 to 1992 at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, the Kunstakademie Munster, and the Hochschule fur bildende Kunste Hamburg, though no formal degree is documented from any of the three.

His profile rose sharply in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In 2001 he represented Germany at the 49th Venice Biennale with "Totes Haus u r Venedig 2001," a transformation of the German Pavilion into a maze of rooms and dead ends, for which he was awarded the Golden Lion. He has since held survey exhibitions at institutions including the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Dusseldorf, MACRO in Rome, Kunstmuseum Bochum, MACBA in Barcelona, and Hamburger Kunsthalle. He has also taught as a professor at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf. Schneider received the Preis der Gunther-Peill-Stiftung in 2008, became a member of the Nordrhein-Westfalische Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Kunste in 2015 and of the Akademie der Kunste, Berlin, in 2018, and received the Ernst Franz Vogelmann Prize for Sculpture in 2023. In 2026 the Kunsthalle Dusseldorf presented "Haus u r 2026," a large exhibition surveying the still-ongoing project, and Sprovieri in London presented "Rheydt NOW."

Critical attention to Schneider has centered less on a signature visual style than on the psychological and architectural effect of his work: rooms rebuilt inside rooms, corridors that lead nowhere, and domestic spaces made to feel unsettling rather than comforting. Writers have described the effect of his installations in terms of unease and disorientation rather than conventional aesthetic pleasure. The through line in critical response is that Schneider treats architecture itself, rather than objects placed within it, as his primary material.

Schneider's commercial market is built on a long gallery relationship rather than on a deep public auction record. Konrad Fischer Galerie states it has worked with him since 1993, and Sprovieri presented his work in London in 2026. Documented auction results, including sales at Van Ham Kunstauktionen and Phillips, sit in the low five figures, but the sources available for this profile do not give exact sale dates or confirm which result represents his true all-time high, so no auction record is published in the frontmatter; collectors should verify any figure against a named auction house and sale date before relying on it.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Schneider, and his output is closely tied to site-specific, often architecturally embedded installations that do not convert easily into a conventional collectible object, which likely explains the thin public auction record. His market signal comes primarily from institutional exhibition history and a long-standing relationship with Konrad Fischer Galerie rather than from a track record of public sales, so collectors should weight museum validation and gallery provenance heavily and treat any secondary-market price claims with care until they can be verified against a named auction house and date.