Susanne Rottenbacher studied stage design at Barnard College of Columbia University in New York and completed a Master of Science with a focus on light at the Bartlett School of Architecture and Planning in London. She worked as a stage designer at the Deutsche Oper Berlin and as a lighting designer for the firm "Licht Kunst Licht," where she contributed to the lighting design for the German Chancellery and other new government buildings.
Since 2004, she has been working as an independent light artist. Susanne Rottenbacher creates large-scale installations from sculptural elements best described as light-color structures. Her sculptures are characterized by a great sense of lightness and transparency, transforming in dialogue with their surrounding space and varying with the time of day. They permeate the space like three-dimensional drawings, reinterpreting it in the process. The organically curved forms appear to be in dynamic motion, yet are frozen in an explosive moment.
She has received numerous awards and grants, including an Artist in Residence scholarship at the Centre of Contemporary Art (CCA) in Andratx, Mallorca (2016), first prize for the “Art in Architecture” competition at COR Düsseldorf (2013), the IIDA Award of Merit from IESNA for the lighting design of the Marie-Elisabeth Lüders House in the Bundestag, Berlin (2005), and the Josephine Paddock Scholarship from Columbia University in New York (1991).
In addition to numerous museum exhibitions (including the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin/Haus am Waldsee, Dubai/Salsali Private Museum, Renaissance Castle Tüssling) and commissioned works for private homes and companies like Maker Maxity in Mumbai, India, Susanne Rottenbacher garnered significant attention with her remarkable site-specific installation at the Palazzo Pisani during the Venice Biennale in 2017.
