About Sophie Calle
Born in 1953 in Paris, France. Lives and works in Malakoff, France, and is represented by Paula Cooper Gallery and Perrotin.
Since the late 1970s, Sophie Calle has merged image and narration. Her work methodically organizes an unveiling of reality – her own and that of others, while allocating a controlled part of this reality to chance. The theme of absence is central to her work. From the beginning, she has exhibited in galleries and international museums. A major exhibition entitled “A suivre” was held in 1991 at ARC / Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. In 2003, a Sophie Calle retrospective titled “M’as-tu vue” (“Did you See Me?”) was organised by the Centre Pompidou (then travelled to the Martin- Gropius-Bau, Berlin, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin and the Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen, Germany). For “Take Care of Yourself” at the 2007 Venice Biennale, Calle invited women to interpret a breakup email, orchestrating these interpretations by combining texts, photographs and videos. This exhibition then travelled to the Bibliothèque nationale de France and throughout twenty museums across the world. More recently, “Rachel, Monique” dealt with the death of her mother. Different versions of the exhibition were exhibited at Palais de Tokyo (2010), the Avignon Festival (2012), the Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest in New York (2014), and at Castello di Rivoli in Torino, “MAdRE” in 2015. The exhibition “Last Seen”, recently exhibited at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston echoed a 1991 series of the same title, also linked with Museum collections.
Recent solo exhibitions include “Pour la dernière et pour la première fois” at Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Canada, 2015, at the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Aichi, Japan, 2015 and at Nagasaki Prefectural Art Museum, Nagasaki, Japan, 2016; “Modus vivendi” at la Virreina, Centre de la Imatge, Barcelona, Spain, 2016; “Cuídese mucho” at Museo Tamayo, Mexico, 2014 and at el Centro Cultural Néstor Kirchner, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2015.
Personal exhibitions will be held at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, San-Francisco from June 28 to August 20, 2017 and at Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris from October 10, 2017 to February 11, 2018.
(Portrait of Sophie Calle. Photo by Guillaume Ziccarelli Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery & Perrotin)
