Elisa Schaar
Elisa Schaar is a Senior Tutor in Art History and Theory.
Elisa Schaar is a scholar, writer, and curator, specializing in American and European postwar art and in contemporary art. Her work explores such topics as the deconstruction of modernism; art’s relation to place and to the passage of time; questions of artistic medium, technological progress, and the human experience; broad philosophical questions of representation and truth; and issues of gender and feminisms, across a wide range of artistic practices. In her work, she is interested in how art works are shaped by their specific historical circumstances and how they resonate with much broader political and philosophical questions about art and the world.
After completing her AB in Philosophy at Harvard and her DPhil in Art History at Oxford, she held a Terra Foundation for American Art postdoctoral fellowship at The Courtauld and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the Ruskin School of Art, where she has been a tutor since.
While trained as a scholar, she often works with artists and across different contexts. Her work has encompassed research projects at the Pinakothek der Moderne; writing for magazines and journals, including Artforum, Art History, and American Art, as well as for museum catalogues and artist monographs; and curating exhibitions, such as “Förg in Venice”, which was an official collateral event of the Venice Biennale 2019. As Program Director at the Terra Foundation for American Art, she led the strategic rethinking of the foundation’s work with contemporary artists and in the convenings area.
Elisa has published articles and exhibition catalogue essays on a range of postwar and contemporary artists, such as Alexandra Bircken, Miriam Cahn, Günther Förg, Lena Henke, Ragnar Kjartansson, Spencer Lewis, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Fred Sandback, Sturtevant, and Fiona Tan.
Her book project, entitled Sturtevant: Unruly Repetition, is the first book-length study of the American artist Elaine Sturtevant’s work that takes into account her recent videos alongside the repetitions of works by artist peers that she started making in New York in the 1960s. By theorizing works from across her career, the manuscript shows that her conceptualist practice was a coherent one concerned with more far-reaching themes than originality and the art system, as is commonly assumed. Elisa has presented excerpts from this research in public lectures in conjunction with Sturtevant’s exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery, Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt, and Julia Stoschek Collection.
