ST. LOUIS, MO.- The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis announces a new installation on its 60 foot-long Project Wall by Swiss artist Claudia Comte. The artist has long been interested in wall painting as a site of intermedia transformation, including such works as Curves and Zigzags, a superimposed graphic painting on a three-dimensional structure installed in Palm Desert as an Op art intervention on the natural landscape. Comte continues her inquiry into the zigzag shape—her biographical information is laid out in a zigzag format on her website— with Electric Burst (Lines and Zigzags), her most complex wall painting to date. The work is on view May 11 through August 19, 2018.

A pattern of hard-edge lines appear to morph into an algorithm of zigzags on the Project Wall. Comte’s rigorous geometries entertain optical apparitions, solids undergoing liquefaction, a stringent graphic study transforming before the eyes. The work is in keeping with Comte’s injection of play, irony, and a seeming nonchalance throughout her practice, paying homage as well as having fun with modernist traditions. Past projects by the artist include an outdoor fun fair for Art Basel with participatory and menacingly titled games: Drop ‘Em All, bowling; Dance or Die, dance competition; and Bend or Break, arm wrestling. For Manhattan’s City Hall Park Comte created marble bunnies carved from fourteen tons of Carrara marble. For the Swiss artist’s first New York exhibition at the Gladstone Gallery, she created her own small museum, hanging striped wall paintings on striped walls, constructing views through plywood walls with a chainsaw, and installing her own chainsaw sculptures of abstract forms. Comte is also fond of wordplay and palindromes: NO MELON NO LEMON and NOW I WON, for example.

Comte says of her overall practice, “I am interested in the way rhythm originates from a simple pattern. Rhythm can infuse life with a sense of empathy towards an abstract inanimate figure, in this case amplifying the effect of the wall. This also creates an emotional connection between the work and the audience. It interests me how, if observed for a while, a person may create a bond with these patterns. For me they possess physical opportunities, not only in creating optical illusions, but also in their potential to rouse meditation, reflection, joy…. This joy can be called Sorglosigkeit, a German word that means the lightness of those that are free of worries.”

Another example of the illusion of Sorglosigkeit may be found on her official website (claudiacomte.ch): “Anyone interested in the secret of her practice,” Chris Sharp writes, “will be able to access it here, for it is fully accessible, and it turns out, not much of a secret (which it just so happens, is its secret).”

Claudia Comte (b. 1983, Grancy, Switzerland) lives and works in Berlin and Grancy. Comte has shown her work in solo and group exhibitions including: Swiss Performance Now, Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2018); KölnSkulpture #9, Cologne, Germany (2017); La Ligne Claire, Basement Rome (2017); NOW I WON, Messeplatz, Art Basel (2017); 10 Rooms, 40 Walls, 1059 m2, Kunstmuseum Lucerne, Switzerland (2017); Desert X, Palm Springs, California (2017); Catch The Tail By The Tiger, König Galerie, Berlin (2016); The Language of Things, with the Public Art Fund, New York (2016); NO MELON NO LEMON, Gladstone Gallery, New York (2015); Easy Heavy III, Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich (2014); Sharp Sharp at David Dale Gallery, Glasgow (2014); If I were a rabbit, where would I keep my gloves?, BolteLang, Zurich (2013); and Elevation 1049, Gstaad, Switzerland (2013). Comte studied at the Ecole Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne, Switzerland, ECAL (2004–07) followed by a Masters of Art in Science of Education at Haute Ecole Pédagogique, Visual Arts, Lausanne, (2008–10).