Shimon Attie

Shimon Attie (born Los Angeles in 1957 ) is an American visual artist. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008, The Rome Prize in 2001 and a Visual Artist Fellowship from Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advance Study in 2007. His work spans a variety of media, including photography, site-specific installation, multiple channel immersive video installation, performance, and new media. Much of Attie’s practice explores how a wide range of contemporary media may be used to re-imagine new relationships between space, time, place, and identity. Much, though not all, of Attie’s work in the 90s dealt with the history of the second world war. He first garnered significant international attention by slide projecting images of past Jewish life onto contemporary locations in Berlin.More recent projects have involved using a range of media to engage local communities to find new ways of representing their history, memory and potential futures. Attie’s artworks and interventions are site-specific and immersive in nature, and tend to engage subject matter that is both social, political and psychological. In 2013, Shimon Attie was awarded the Lee Krasner Award for Lifetime Achievement in Art.

He was born in 1957 and received an MFA in 1991. In 1991 he moved to Germany from his previous home in Northern California, and began to make work initially about Jewish identity and the history of the second world war. His work later evolved to engage broader issues of memory, place and identity more generally. Shimon Attie

moved to New York City in 1997.

Laura Hodes in Forward felt his 2012 show at Northwestern succeeded in creating a space that was at once dream like and a memorial to the dead, involving the viewer in the historical situation: "we become simultaneously the hidden Jew, the marching Nazi, the Dutch passersby, the voyeur and even the medium itself."

Solo Exhibitions include: 2013 Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; 2012 Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, NY; 2011 The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, CT; 2008 de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; 2006 Miami Art Museum, Miami, FL; 2005 Numark Gallery, Washington, D.C.; 2004 Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; 2002 Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, NY; 2001 Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, CA; 1999-00 The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston, MA; 1998 Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, NY; 1996 Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; 1995 Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York, NY; 1995 Ruth Bloom Gallery, Los Angeles, California; 1995 Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo, Norway. Group Exhibitions Include: Art Institute of Chicago 2013; Kunst Museum Bonn 2011; The Museum of Modern Art, NY 1994/5, 2000-01; The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 2001, 2005, 2008, 2013; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris 2007; The Brooklyn Museum 2013; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA 2003; Printemps de September a Toulouse 2001

His photographs Almstadtstrasse 43, Berlin (1930). (car parked in front of Hebrew bookstore) (1991) and Mulackstrasse 37, Berlin (1932). (children and tower) (1991) are owned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Other collections include The Corcoran Gallery of Art, The Miami Art Museum, Centre Georges Pompidou, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among many others.