Juergen Staack (born in Doberlug-Kirchhain in 1978) is a German minimalist and conceptual artist based in Düsseldorf. Training and background After completing high school, Juergen Staack trained as a photographer. He subsequently attended Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 2002 to 2008 where he studied with Thomas Ruff and Christopher Williams. In 2003, while still a student, he founded the artist group FEHLSTELLE along with other students. Work Staack developed his own forms of expression in conceptual photography very early in his career, both questioning the translatability of photography to language as well as the “material fragility of the analog photograph and, in its fleeting quality, the digital photograph as well.” Towards this end, he uses various media such as performance, sound, video, sculpture, and photography and frequently makes the beholder a constitutive component of the artwork itself. Recurring themes in Staack’s work include the relationship between the image and its reproduction as well as its authenticity and origin, which he repeatedly questions. “His drawings, sound installations, speaking images, and poetic performances,” as the journalist Helga Meister laconically comments, “demonstrate the limits of visual representation.” Meanwhile, Peter Friese, former director of Bremen’s Museum Weserburg, concludes: In his artistic work, Staack is not only interested in the questions of What an image is? What constitutes an image? How, when, and where does it emerge? But also: what is the importance of an image in a world shaped by visual stimuli? He finds his terrain as a conceptual artist precisely in the image’s controversial claim to truth and the mass saturation of our world with ever more advanced media of communication. Results of this research are in part surprising investigations that are critical of the image and the media. Staack here moves in the liminal areas of photography and, with a critical gaze that questions contexts, examines the social-anchored use of images with information that crosses various media, with language and text.For Staack, unexpected processes of transformation and translation play a special role in a literal and metaphorical sense. Using illegible codes or news items that dissolve, his works unsettle classical structures of communication, sometimes taking them to absurd lengths. In so doing, they demonstrate “not only gaps between perception and communication, but also the limits of visual representation. In the age of an all dominating global visual culture,” according to art historian Sabine Maria Schmidt, "Juergen Staack poses the question of the foundations and