NEW YORK, NY.- The Paula Cooper Gallery announced that Christian Marclay's groundbreaking new 24-hour video work The Clock has been awarded the Golden Lion for best artwork in the 54th Venice Biennale. Called "an abundant, magnificent work" (The Financial Times) "relentless and compelling" (The Guardian) and "utterly transfixing" (The Huffington Post), The Clock is on view in the Arsenale through 27 November 2011 as part of the exhibition, Illuminations, organized by Bice Curiger.

In The Clock, Marclay samples thousands of film excerpts indicating the passage of time. Spanning the range of timepieces, from clock towers to wristwatches and from buzzing alarm clocks to the occasional cuckoo, The Clock draws attention to time as a multifaceted protagonist of cinematic narrative. With virtuosic skill, the artist has excerpted each of these moments from their original contexts and edited them together to form a 24-hour montage, which unfolds in real time. While constructed from a dizzying variety of periods, contexts and film genres whose storylines seem to have shattered in a multitude of narrative shards, The Clock uncannily proceeds at a unified pace as if re-ordered by the latent narrative of time itself. Because it is synchronized with the local time of the exhibition space, the work conflates cinematic and actual time, revealing each passing minute as a repository of alternately suspenseful, tragic or romantic narrative possibilities.

The Clock was exhibited at the Paula Cooper Gallery in January and February 2011; in London at the Hayward Gallery as part of British Art Show: 7, and in October 2010 at White Cube Gallery. The Clock is currently on view through July 20th at the Los Angeles County Art Museum, where it was recently acquired for the permanent collection.

Christian Marclay has exhibited his work for more than three decades in museums around the world. His 2003 retrospective, which originated at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, traveled to other North American institutions as well as venues in France, Switzerland and Great Britain. The touring exhibition Replay, focusing on his video work, originated at the Cité de la Musique, Paris, in 2007 and was presented at DHC/ART in Montreal (2008). In 2010, the Whitney Museum of American Art organized “Festival” a one-person exhibition organized around Marclay’s “graphic scores,” works to be interpreted by musicians as scores for performances. As a pioneering turntablist, performing and recording music since 1979, Marclay made a significant impact on the new music scene. He has performed internationally, alone or in collaboration with musicians John Zorn, Zeena Parkins, Butch Morris, Christian Wolff, Shelley Hirsch, Günter Müller, the Kronos Quartet, Sonic Youth, and many others.