Max Hooper Schneider

Max Hooper Schneider’s polymathic practice brings together the fields of biology, philosophy, and landscape architecture to create objects and environments that speculate on entropic forces and posthuman forms. Hooper Schneider develops and explores the aesthetics of succession, abandonment, and the uncanny through habitat-like artworks that materialize and dramatize natural and artificial systems. Conceiving of nature as a process of ceaseless morphological change, Hooper Schneider never takes the idea of the body for granted, instead proposing countless ways for bodies to be continuously broken down, recreated and transformed. With a deeply researched practice that draws upon fieldwork around the world, Hooper Schneider defamiliarizes human-centered time scales and material culture, returning time and again to the strangenesses and symbioses that have preceded and that will outlast human civilization.

Hooper Schneider (b. 1982, Los Angeles, CA) received his Master’s degree in Landscape Architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design and his Bachelor’s degrees in Urban Design and Biology from New York University, with additional studies in Marine Biology and Entomology at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and Santa Monica College. He has shown in solo exhibitions at prominent museums and institutions internationally, including UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, MO.CO Montpellier Museée Contemporain, and the Hammer Museum. His museum group exhibitions include Centre Pompidou-Metz, Schinkel Pavillon, Leeum Museum of Art, Kistefos Museum, and Musée d’art moderne de Paris. Hooper Schneider has been included in a number of international biennial exhibitions, including the 15th Gwangju Biennale, 16th Istanbul Biennial, 13th Baltic Triennial, and the Mongolia Land Art Biennial.

Hooper Schneider’s works are held in major public and private collections, including the Hammer Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Musée d’art moderne Paris, Rubell Museum, Fondation Lafayette, and Fonds d’art contemporain de la Ville de Genève, among others. He was awarded the BMW Art Journey Prize in 2017 and the Schmidt Ocean Institute Prize in 2023. He lives and works in Los Angeles.