Omer Fast

Omer Fast (; born in Jerusalem, 1972) is an Israeli contemporary artist who lives and works in Berlin.

Early life and education Born and raised in Jerusalem, Fast spent much of his teenage years in New York. He received his BFA from a dual-degree program at Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1995, majoring in English and painting, and received an MFA from Hunter College in 2000. He subsequently got a job doing magazine layout before moving to Berlin in 2001.

Exhibitions Fast has had solo exhibitions at the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2020), Guangdong Times Art Museum (2018), Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin (2016), Jeu de Paume, Paris (2015), Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2012), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2010), Berkeley Art Museum (2009), Museum of Modern Art, Vienna (2007), Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh (2005), Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis (2005), Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2004), and the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt (2003). His work has also been featured in dOCUMENTA (13) (2012), Performa (2009), and the 54th Venice Biennale. In 2016 the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin presented the exhibition "Omer Fast. Talking is not always the solution". His work has been exhibited in the United States and internationally. In October 2015, a monographic exhibition of Fast’s work titled Present Continuous opened at the Jeu de Paume, Paris, and subsequently traveled to the Baltic Center for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK, and the KUNSTEN Museum of Modern Art, Aalborg, Denmark. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; La Caixa, Madrid, Spain; Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montréal, Canada; Museum of Contemporary Art, Krakow, Poland; STUK Leuven, Belgium; Dallas Museum of Art, TX; Cleveland Museum of Art, OH; the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; the Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. His work was featured in dOCUMENTA (13), the 54th Venice Biennale, and the 2002 and 2008 Whitney Biennials.

Feature films

Fast wrote and directed his debut feature film Remainder in 2015, based on the 2005 novel of the same name by Tom McCarthy. It stars Tom Sturrdige and Cush Jumbo. Lorena Muñoz-Alonso of Artnet compared Fast's avant-garde style to that of Steve McQueen and Sam Taylor-Johnson, urging audiences not "to expect an easily consumable feature." Fast said that he was inspired to make the film after being introduced to the book by a journalist colleague. The film was generally well received by critics.

Controversy

In 2017, Fast's solo exhibition at James Cohan Gallery in New York City generated controversy when a coalition of Asian-American groups entered and protested the installation, making claims that the work was orientalist, gentrifying, and colonizing as it traded in stereotypes of Chinatown aesthetics. In a statement, Fast wrote that in re-creating the appearance of the building before the gallery moved in, he sought to heighten "the tension between appearance and essence" of the immigrant experience, which he related to his own as an Israel-born naturalized American.

Awards and collections Fast was the recipient of the 2009 Preis der Nationalgalerie für Junge Kunst and the 2008 Bucksbaum Award from the Whitney Museum of American Art. Fast's work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Hamburger Bahnhof, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Museum of Modern Art, Vienna.