In 2019, the New Museum presented a major retrospective of the work of Hans Haacke (b. 1936, Cologne, Germany), the first major American museum exhibition to survey Haacke’s work in over thirty years.

For six decades, Haacke has been a pioneer in kinetic art, environmental art, Conceptual art, and institutional critique. This retrospective brought together more than thirty works from across the artist’s career, focusing in particular on the way he expanded the parameters of his practice to encompass the social, political, and economic structures in which art is produced, circulated, and displayed. The exhibition included a number of Haacke’s rarely seen kinetic works, environmental sculptures, and visitor polls of the late 1960s and early ’70s, all of which were central to discussions around systems aesthetics in art during that period; works from the 1970s and ’80s addressing the corporate sponsorship of major art institutions and political interference; and more recent works considering the intersection of global capitalism, nationalism, and humanitarian crises around the world. The exhibition also serveD as the New York premiere of Haacke’s sculpture Gift Horse (2014), a bronze sculpture of a horse’s skeleton adorned with an LED ribbon streaming stock prices in real time, which the artist originally created for London’s Fourth Plinth program. This long-overdue assessment of his work highlighted its formal and critical complexity and the remarkable consistency with which he has approached the relationship between art and society.

This exhibition was curated by Gary Carrion-Murayari, Kraus Family Curator, and Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director. The exhibition was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue co-published by the New Museum and Phaidon Press.