Having studied at Hochschule der Künste in Berlin and at the Royal College of Art in London in the late 1980s both under English sculptor David Evison and Yugoslavian performance artist Marina Abramović, Karsten Konrad's reoccurring themes are »Identity and Memory«, »Material and History«, »Structuralism and Linguistics«, as well as »Urbanity and Urbanism«.

For more than 20 years his work has been exhibited in museums and institutions throughout Europe, North-America, and Asia. For example, in autumn of 2012 he was awarded with the Great Prize of the 53rd Belgrade October Salon for his site-specific intervention at the Geozavod / Belgrade Cooperative-building (1907).

Between 2010–2013 he has been professor at Universität der Künste Berlin and the China Academy of Art Hangzhou.

Sculpture for Konrad is an unerring instrument of analysis in order to examine and inspect our reality. Archaeologically he digs out the buried hopes and modernist utopias inscribed in discarded commodities, furniture, machines, and architectures. In a kind of modernist ›house clearing‹ he surveys a future that was – art history (e.g. Smith, Caro, Stella) as well as the social dreams located covertly in articles of daily use – for its contemporary capability; thus, relocating it into our very own present.