Dieter Appelt was born in 1935 in Niemegk, Germany. From 1954, he enrolled at the Mendelssohn Bartholdy Akademie in Leipzig to study music and vocal studies and began studying photography a few years later, from 1964, at the University of the Arts in Berlin. While pursuing a career as a professional singer and member of the choir of the Deutsche Oper Berlin in the 1970s, he simultaneously began to receive attention for his photography, painting, and sculpture, which became notable through his use of monumental sequences and tableaux compositions. Through the techniques of long exposure times, multiple exposures, shadow and mirror compositions, Appelt’s images explore such themes as memory, time, transience, life, death, and recurrence.

In 1990, Dieter Appelt took part in the Venice Biennale and again in 1999. In 1994, several museums participated in a travelling exhibition of a major retrospective (including in Québec, New York, New Orleans, and Berlin). In 1982, Dieter Appelt was appointed professor for film, video and photography at the University of the Arts in Berlin. From 1999 to 2000, he went on to hold the offices of vice dean and vice president of the university. Since 1997, he has been a member of the Academie der Künste, Berlin. In 2005, he was awarded the Knight Purchase Prize for Photographic Media from the Akron Art Museum in Ohio. Important solo exhibitions include the Kurt Tucholsky Literaturmuseum (2018), Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg (2009), the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (2007), Musée Réattu, Arles (2007), the Canadian Centre of Architecture (2005), la maison rouge, Paris (2004), and the Théâtre de la photographie et de l’image, Nice (2004). Recent group exhibitions include Akron Art Museum, Ohio, USA, (2022), Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Germany (2022), Pasquart, Biel, Switzerland (2017), Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, Germany (2016), Museum of Art, Ein Harod, Israel (2016), Busan Museum of Art, South Korea (2015). His work is included in numerous public collections such as that of the Berlinische Galerie and Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Centre Georges Pompidou, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, LACMA, SFMOMA, the National Gallery of Scotland, the National Portrait Gallery, London, Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Canadian Centre of Architecture. Dieter Appelt lives and works in Berlin.

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