About the artwork
This work is taken from the installation Prenez soin de vous, created by the artist for the French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2007. Sophie Calle, who often uses her love life as the starting point for her artistic creations, began this work after receiving a break-up e-mail. She shares it with 107 women and asks them to reinterpret it. The e-mail is then hijacked and rewritten in their own way, often through the prism of their profession (woman of letters, journalist, lawyer...). or according to other, more singular approaches. This work is presented in two parts. A photograph of Alice Lenay reading the e-mail, accompanied by the text she has transcribed in SMS language. The installation was the subject of numerous exhibitions (Montreal, Paris, London, New York...) between 2007 and 2016, most recently at Galerie Perrotin in 2020. The texts and photographs presented have also been re-edited to create a book of the same name.
Expert opinion
This work is part of one of Sophie Calle's most acclaimed projects, and represents its very essence. Her tendency to shift the intimate to the public and confuse her art with her life is evident in this project, which also features 107 self-fictions of broken relationships in dialogue with her own.
About the artist
Born in Paris in 1953, Sophie Calle is an artist who lives and works in Paris. A major figure in French contemporary art, she is known as a photographer and video artist whose work, both conceptual and literary, displaces the intimate into the public sphere, while playing with the boundaries between art and private life. Indeed, his first artistic adventures were performances that took place in his everyday life. In 1979, the artist invited twenty people to sleep in her bed, and in 1980, she decided to follow a stranger to Venice. Sophie Calle's work is based on a powerful narrative that evokes themes of absence, lack and disappearance, as evidenced by the series Prenez soin de vous (Take care of yourself). In 2004, the Centre Pompidou devoted a retrospective to her, making her a key artist on the French contemporary scene. Following this, Sophie Calle was invited to represent France at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007, and went on to make a name for herself around the world. In 2022, the Musée d'Orsay devoted an exhibition to her entitled Les fantômes d'Orsay, and her work was honored at the Art Institute of Chicago in the United States.
“When I'm unwell, I tend to tell everyone about it. I approach art in the same way: the first gesture is therapeutic, then the work takes its place and becomes the sole driving force.”
Additional info
Signed
Dated
Framed
Proof of authenticity
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