Hannover, b. 1964

Born in Hanover in 1964, Baumgarten studied at the “Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe” and the “École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris”, later receiving his MFA from Tokyo University of the Arts in 1999. Since 2008, he has served as professor in the Department of Painting at Hongik University, establishing his practice in Seoul. His sustained artistic concern has been the hybridity of architecture and lived experience within urban neighborhoods. When he first visited Seoul in 1993, the dense vistas of red-brick and concrete houses climbing the hillsides struck him as at once unfamiliar and compelling. He has since focused on the hybrid landscapes born of the encounter between Western architectural order and Korean sensibilities of habitation, articulating them through his visual idiom.