Sophie Calle “Absence”
Paula Cooper Gallery "534 W 21 St."
This event has ended.
The Paula Cooper Gallery presents Absence, a special exhibition of works by Sophie Calle created between 2006 and the present.
The works, an ever-changing project inspired by the loss of Calle’s mother Rachel Monique, were first exhibited in Venice in 2007, and then in expanded exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo (2010) and the Festival d’Avignon (2012). As Patrick Frey observed in Sophie Calle: The Reader, “Absence recurs in Calle’s oeuvre as a generative drive.” These memento mori demonstrate the artist’s deft weaving of photographic documentation, narrative texts, found imagery and personal iconography. Calle’s efforts to create a space for the deceased are both intimate and universally resonant acts of elegiac composition.
The artist will also exhibit a new series entitled Purloined, which is directly related to works in a concurrent show at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Purloined continues Calle’s investigation of a set of thirteen works which were stolen from the Gardner Museum in 1990. Read more about the exhibition in The New York Times.
Calle’s work has been shown at many international venues including the Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston), the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Museum Boymans van Beuningen (Rotterdam), the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art (Tokyo). She was the recipient of the 2010 Hasselblad Award for photography.
[Image: Sophie Calle “Autobiographies (The Giraffe)” (2012) digital print mounted on aluminum, text panel with black & white photograph and found frame, text: 19 3/4 x 19 3/4 in.]
Media
Schedule
from October 18, 2013 to November 16, 2013