Sophie Calle

Artists

Sophie Calle

Press release

With her ingenious mix of fact and fiction, seriousness and playfulness, cool distance and unabashed intimacy, Sophie Calle stands as one of the most interesting and influential voices of contemporary art. She will often create suspenseful scenarios where, acting almost like a detective, she tries to get under the skin of both strangers and locations. For five decades, Sophie Calle has been a leading figure in the visual arts with her original work that tackles the big questions of existence and human emotions in general – love, loss, guilt, fear, embarrassment, etc. – in a rigorous, conceptual mode of expression. Her works often consist of a combination of photography and text. The registering sobriety that we associate with a photograph is combined with deeply personal narratives – the artist’s or others – that are both heartfelt, moving, messy, funny and ironic. In other words, the exact opposite of any kind of sober documentation. But Sophie Calle’s signature is precisely this field of tension between fact and fiction, between public and private, coolness and passion.