Nicolaus Schafhausen only officially takes over at the FRANKFURTER KUNSTVEREIN this month, but he’s already off to a running start. In September, the thirty-three-year-old former director of the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart organized “Starter,” a night of performances, readings, videos, and concerts by artists including Jonathan Meese, Liam Gillick, Daniel Pflumm, and Stephen Prina. He followed that event up with “User-surface City,” which brought artists, designers, urbanists, and art theorists to the recently renovated building for a series of lectures. It’s an interdisciplinary, theoretically sophisticated approach Schafhausen hopes will mark the Kunstverein during his tenure. He will pursue similar goals with the publications he will edit for the institution, opting for inexpensive, text-heavy paperbacks over the luxe coffee-table varieties favored by his predecessor, Peter Weiermeier. Schafhausen—a former artist himself—was cofounder (with Markus Schneider) of Cologne’s Galerie Lukas & Hoffmann and co-organizer (with Klaus Biesenbach) of the well-regarded 1996 exhibition “Nach Weimar.” For his first exhibitions in Frankfurt, in addition to Meese et al., Schafhausen plans to invite such (mostly) young artists as Jeroen de Rijke & Willem de Rooij, Olafur Eliasson, Octavian Trauttmansdorff, Bernd Krauss, Monika Oechsler, Monica Bonvicini, and Isa Genzken.
