Artists

LENI HOFFMANN

Leni Hoffmann lives in Düsseldorf / Karlsruhe and works in situ. They create site-specific projects that engage with architecture, often unfolding through time-based interventions. Hoffmann graduated as Meisterschüler of Georg Karl Pfahler at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg. Since 2002, they have held a professorship in painting and graphic arts at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe.

Hoffmann’s work has been exhibited widely throughout Europe and Australia, including at the Sprengel Museum Hannover, Kunstmuseum St.Gallen, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Museum Ludwig Köln, Städel Museum Frankfurt, Wilhelm-Hack-Museum Ludwigshafen, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Palazzo delle Papesse Siena, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, and the Städtische Galerie Karlsruhe. They participated in the 3rd Moscow Biennale and has received numerous awards, including the Gabriele Münter Prize and the Villa Massimo Rome Prize.

VERONIKA SPIERENBURG

Veronika Spierenburg is a Swiss-Dutch artist working across sound, movement, and architecture. She is interested in how spatial perception can be explored through movement and sound, and she often collaborates with dancers, environmental scientist, and researchers from fields such as dance studies and architecture. Her long-term, research-based projects frequently culminate in film works. She is currently working on a film about the Japanese architect Kazuo Shinohara and preparing a book with MACK (London) on the Swiss architect Flora Ruchat-Roncati, to be published IN 2027.

ZARA PFEIFER

Zara Pfeifer is an artist based in Vienna and Berlin whose work engages with the social phenomena of large-scale infrastructure. She studied architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and photography at the Friedl Kubelka School for Artistic Photography in Vienna. Since 2019, she teaches a seminar on architectural photography at the Technical University of Vienna. Her work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles, the Academy of Arts in Berlin, and the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale. She has received numerous honors, including a studio grant from the Austrian Federal Government at ISCP New York and the MAK Schindler Scholarship in Los Angeles for 2025/26.

Related Events

Final Projects: Group LVIII is supported by the Austrian Consulate General in Los Angeles. The Artists- and Architects-in-Residence Program at the Mackey Apartments is organized and led in cooperation with the MAK — Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna.

Through radical map projections, explored in her series Study of Distortion—Isometric Systems in Isotropic Space, and ecological proposals, Denes expands our understanding of the planet as both system and symbol. Anchored by documentation of iconic projects like Wheatfield—A Confrontation (1982), where Denes cultivated a wheat field in Manhattan as a symbol of global inequities, the exhibition highlights her deep commitment to sustainable futures.

At a time of escalating climate crises, Denes’ work asks us to reconsider how land and nature can foster collective responsibility and ecological renewal. 

Extending this inquiry into the present, the exhibition features a reading table displaying sketches for the artist's proposed public artwork, 1000 Sunflowers to Drive By, envisioned for the median along Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood. The project imagines a field of illuminated sunflowers transforming a stretch of urban infrastructure into a luminous landscape: an emblem of regeneration and shared care. Conceived in dialogue with The Future is Fragile, this proposal positions the exhibition as a stage for future growth and a platform for ongoing programmatic and artistic investigation.

Curated by Beth Stryker.

Agnes Denes

Agnes Denes is one of the most prominent artist of our time, recognized as a pioneer of ecological and land art, as well as other art forms. Often working on a monumental scale, her visionary work deals with environmental, cultural and social issues, immersed in science, philosophy, history, and psychology, addressing the challenges of global survival.

Wheatfield—A Confrontation, which the scholar and curator Jeffrey Weiss, has called “perpetually astonishing … one of Land Art’s great transgressive masterpieces” (Artforum, September 2008) is perhaps Agnes Denes’s best-known work. It was created during a four-month period in the spring and summer of 1982 when Denes, with the support of the Public Art Fund, planted a field of golden wheat on two acres of rubble-strewn landfill near Wall Street and the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan (now the site of Battery Park City and the World Financial Center). Among her many other artistic achievements is Tree Mountain—A Living Time Capsule, a monumental earthwork, reclamation project and the first man-made virgin forest, situated in Ylöjärvi, Finland. The site was dedicated by the President of Finland upon its completion in 1996 and is legally protected for the next four hundred years.

Agnes Denes is also known for her innovative use of metallic inks and other nontraditional materials in creating a prodigious body of exquisitely rendered drawings and prints that delineate her explorations in mathematics, philosophy, geography, science and other disciplines. Works by Denes are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; the Art Institute of Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Centre Pompidou in Paris; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Kunsthalle Nürnberg and many other major institutions worldwide.

She has completed public and private commissions in North and South America, Europe, Australia and the Middle East, and has received numerous honors and awards including four fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and four grants from the New York State Council on the Arts; the DAAD Fellowship, Berlin, Germany (1978); the American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award (1985); M.I.T's highly prestigious Eugene McDermott Achievement Award “In Recognition of Major Contribution to the Arts” (1990); the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome (1998); the Watson Trans-disciplinary Art Award from Carnegie Mellon University (1999); the Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2007); and the Ambassador's Award for Cultural Diplomacy for Strengthening the Friendship between the US and the Republic of Hungary through Excellence in Contemporary Art (2008).

Denes holds honorary doctorates from Ripon College, Ripon, Wisconsin and Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania and has had fellowships at the Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University and the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at M.I.T. She lectures extensively at colleges and universities throughout the United States and abroad and participates in global conferences. She is the author of six books and is featured in numerous other publications on a wide range of subjects in art and the environment.

Born in Budapest, Hungary in 1931, Agnes Denes was raised in Sweden and educated in the United States. Since her exhibition career began in the 1960s, she has participated in more than 450 exhibitions at galleries and museums throughout the world including, among others, solo shows at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1974); the Institute of Contemporary Art, London (1979) and retrospective surveys at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. (1992); the Samek Art Gallery, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pa. (2003); and the Ludwig Museum, Budapest, Hungary (2008). Her work has also been featured in such international surveys as the Biennale of Sydney (1976); Documenta 6, Kassel, Germany (1977); the Venice Biennale (1978, 1980, 2001), and more recently The Last Freedom: From the Pioneers of Land Art of the 1960s to Nature in Cyberspace, Ludwig Museum, Koblenz, Germany (October 16, 2011); Systems, Actions & Processes: 1965–1975, PROA Foundation, Buenos Aires (through September, 2011); Erre: Variations Labyrinthiques, Centre Pompidou, Metz (September 12, 2011 – March 5, 2012); and Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph: 1964 – 1977, Art Institute of Chicago (December 11, 2011 – March 11, 2012).

Agnes Denes is represented by Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York.

Graphic design support generously provided by Handbuilt
Additional support provided by UAP
Special thanks to Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects

Above Image: The Future is Fragile, Handle With Care (Pyramid) 2021
Copyright Agnes Denes, Courtesy Culturunners and Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects