View images of Sophie Calle's most confessional works ever.
Lucy Hogg
French artist Sophie Calle seated among visitors to her Room, an installation at the Lowell Hotel in New York.
Visitors to Calle’s installations have learned to expect the unexpected. From displaying an ex-boyfriend’s break-up letter to showing photos of herself stripping, Calle has remained compelling, peculiar and often controversial. This weekend, the French artist presents the latest in a series of autobiographical ventures, putting mementoes from her past on display in room 3a of the Lowell Hotel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The Daily Beast’s Blake Gopnik reports from the show’s midnight opening, and this image gallery peers into the artist’s most fascinating pieces of the last thirty years.
A red wedding dress, adding an incongruous note to the hotel suite where Calle installed Room, her latest autobiographical project.
Despite being made for the public eye, many of Calle’s projects are almost overwhelmingly personal. In 2001, Calle presented “Autobiographies,” a work presenting her life’s more unusual paths. One component, a photo of her in a billowing red dress, speaks of her shattered plans to marry her fiancé on an airport tarmac.
The man writing a breakup email to Sophie Calle should have known better. But he didn’t, and her response to his offense made for a fascinating multimedia installation called “Take Care of Yourself”—which had been the jilter’s sign-off. Calle invited 107 women from all fields to respond to the letter. The female sharpshooter seen here used it for target practice.
After a difficult breakup, in 2005 Calle exorcized her heartbreak using photos and letters to count down the 92 days that led up to the end of her relationship. Each picture in “Exquisite Pain” is stamped in red with the number of days “to unhappiness.” One reviewer said that the most poignant part of her show was “seeing how her head compulsively overrides her heart.”
In 2008, Calle investigated the border between reality and fantasy. An installation called “Ou et Quand” (“Where and When”) traced her visit to a psychic and her attempt to learn her destiny. The clairvoyant sent Calle on a journey to find her future, starting in the French town of Berck.
Calle was the inspiration for Maria, the main character in a novel by author Paul Auster. Auster gave Maria a “chromatic diet,” in which she ate only foods of a certain color each day. For a week in 1997, Calle copied her fictional alter-ego. For “Red” Tuesday she ate tomatoes, steak tartare, pomegranates and wine. Calle photographed her meals and named the project after the diet.
After a friend asked to crash in her bed, Calle thought “it would be fun to have someone in bed all the time.” That was the birth of “The Sleepers,” a 1979 project in which 28 friends, neighbors and strangers took turns sleeping in Calle’s bed, allowing her to observe and photograph them. The resulting display included almost 200 pictures of slumbering bodies interspersed with brief interviews with Calle’s bedmates.
Calle spent three weeks as a maid in a Venetian hotel, then, in 1981, displayed pictures of the possessions she found in guests’ rooms. The exhibition’s framed photos, from mussed beds to opened letters, hint at the lives of the room’s inhabitants, while descriptions document her finds from each day. “The Hotel” helped launch Calle’s international career.
© Sophie Calle / ADAGP. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
