Sebastian Egenhofer is professor of art history at the University of Vienna (Austria). He is co-leading the Site Complexes: Models of Responsive Practices for the 21st Century project.
After studying painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe, Egenhofer obtained his master’s degree in art history, philosophy, and German studies in Freiburg im Breisgau (Germay) in 1995. He then completed his doctorate in art history at the University of Basel (Switzerland) with a dissertation on the relationship between abstraction and the commodity form in the 20th century (“Abstraktion, Kapitalismus, Subjektivität,” Munich 2008) and worked as a research assistant; from 2007 to 2011 he was the Laurenz Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art in Basel. There he was also a board member of the visual studies research project eikones. From 2012 to 2013, he was an associate professor for contemporary art at the University of Vienna, and from 2013 to 2016 he served as a full professor of art history at the University of Zurich (Switzerland). Since 2016, he has been professor of modern and contemporary art in the Department of Art History at the University of Vienna.
Egenhofer’s research focuses on art from the late 19th and early 20th centuries as well as on developments since the 1960s. In addition to his exploring the history and theoretical foundations of abstraction, his research centers on the development of site-specific art and of institutional critique in the wake of American Minimalism (Towards an Aesthetics of Production, Zurich/Berlin 2016). Methodologically, Egenhofer’s work integrates philosophical as well as technical and economic-historical contexts into art historical research.