Michael Schirner

The artist and communication designer Michael Schirner (1941*) studied at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts under Kilian Breier, Max Bense, Max Bill and Bazon Brock. He worked at the Young & Rubicam advertising agency in Frankfurt/a.M. from 1969 and became a partner in the GKO&S advertising agency in Hamburg in 1971. From 1974, Schirner headed the Düsseldorf-based GGK as creative director and managing director, making the agency a byword for creative advertising. In 1984, he founded KKG Projektagentur, which was renamed Michael Schirner Werbe- und Projektagentur in 1984 and from which the IKM Institute for Art and Media emerged in 2003.

From 1989, Schirner taught as a visiting professor of visual and verbal communication at the Bremen University of the Arts, where he was appointed honorary professor in 1996. In 1999 he became a professor of communication design at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe / ZKM I Zentrum für Kunst und Medien Karlsruhe, in 2002 a visiting professor at the CAFA Central Academy of Fine Arts Beijing in China, and in 2004 a visiting professor at Kyūshū University Faculty of Design in Japan.
Since his studies at the HFBK Hamburg, Michael Schirner has been committed to overcoming the boundaries between free and applied art. With the equation of advertising and art, the radical reduction of image and text (schreIBMaschinen), the making visible of the invisible (series Pictures in our Minds), the making invisible of the visible (series BYE BYE), the work on the self-abolition of the artist as author (Mich gibt es gar nicht), the author of Werbung ist Kunst, the bible of the creative, and curator of the exhibition Art Meets Ads - Avantgarde und Kampagne at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf with works by Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Damian Hirst, Jenny Holzer, Richard Prince et al. a. and campaigns by Benetton, Marlboro, Levis, Nikon a. o. as "Germany's most successful creative", "advertising pope", "advertising guru" and "Beuys of advertising".

Schirner's artistic work is shown in international museums and galleries and includes painting, photography, audio-visual media, theater, music, installation and performance.

2022 Michael Schirner donated his audiovisual archive to the ZKM I Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe.

The Michael Schirner video archive at the ZKM Karlsruhe comprises on 4.5 shelf meters about 280 videotapes with TV, cinema films and radio spots, free artistic AV works, collaborations with artists and students, documentations about actions, exhibitions, music and theater projects, performances, lecture performances, interviews, panel discussions and contributions about Michael Schirner and his work, recorded by ARD, ZDF, RTL, dctp etc.