About
Biography
Ari Pilhofer (they/them) is a London-based artist from Germany, currently completing an MA in Painting at the Slade School of Fine Art, supported by a DAAD scholarship. Their work has been presented during the curated by festival at Galerie Elisabeth&Klaus Thoman (Vienna), Unit2Project Space (London), Bavarian State Ministry for Science and the Arts (Munich), Kurt-Kurt (Berlin), Künstlerhaus (Nürnberg) and in collaborative performances with artist Simone Körner in Nuremberg and Chicago, Illinois.
About the work
Text by Monika Bayer-Wermuth
Ari Pilhofer develops an expanded understanding of painting as an unstable system that unfolds across canvas, body, sculpture, and digital media.
Their works operate with queer-coded, hybrid figures – masks, limbs, insect bodies, ritually charged shadow beings – that resist clear representation. Instead of producing a coherent image, Pilhofer creates transitions, blurrings, permeabilities. Often floating in their installation, their paintings appear as bodies – vulnerable, soft, multiple – while also serving as carriers of techno-symbolic transformation. Analog and digital processes intertwine: painted surfaces are scanned, altered, and translated into sculpture, ceramics, or clothing.
These processes generate a techno-magical imagery in which symbols, surfaces, and bodies merge.
Pilhofer understands softness, repetition, and craft – through sewing, casting, layering – not as ornamental gestures but as political strategies of resistance and recoding. The recurring archetype of the Spider-Knight functions as a fluid vessel of collective practices of protection and refusal. Their works undermine categorical divisions between subject and object, materiality and immateriality, generating a pictorial practice of re-ritualization in which digital and immaterial ghosts merge into tangible artifacts.
Education
2024-26 MA Painting at Slade School of Fine Art, London
2024 First State Examination in Art Education, Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg
2021 Meisterschüler title under Prof. Kerstin Brätsch, Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg
Residencies/Awards (selected)
2026 Shortlisted, Perimeter Studio Award
2026 Cass Art Painting Award
2025 Terence Cuneo Memorial Trust Prize
2025 SOMA Summer, residency programme, México City
2024-26 DAAD Scholarship awarded to support MA study abroad
2020 International Summer Academy Salzburg, residency programme, scholarship awarded by the Free State of Bavaria
Exhibitions (selected)
Solo Exhibitions
2025 Strategic Dissociation, Unit2 ProjectSpace, London, UK
2023 CHOOSE, CHOOSE CHOOSE ( )our,
Galvani Galerie, Nuremberg. Germany
Group Exhibitions
2025 And When I See a Ghost I Really See a Ghost, Gallery Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman, Vienna, Austria,
curated by Monika Bayer-Wermuth, (curated by 2025: Fragmented Subjectivity)
2025 I am the beast I worship, Hackney Bath, London, UK
2024 Slade 1st Year Painting, Split Gallery, London, UK
2024 BIM BAM BOM TV, Młodzieżowy Dom Kultury, Białystok, Poland
2024 I GUESS I NEED YOU BABY, Strafjustizzentrum, Nuremberg, Germany, curated by Simone Körner
2024 Out of Spite, Maxi.Kunst, Nuremberg, Germany
2022 Humanities Festival, Kulturwerkstatt auf AEG, Nuremberg, Germany
2022 literal bodies, Künstlerhaus, Nuremberg, Germany
2021 Phantom Step, Kurt-Kurt, Berlin
2021 Kunst im Ministergang,
Bavarian State Ministry for Science and Art, Munich, Germany
2021 Heavy Heart Of Gold, ortart, Nuremberg, Germany
Press
2026 Parnass, 10 Künstler:innen, die uns 2025 aufgefallen sind