Sophie Calle unveils a massive 300-piece retrospective at Louisiana Museum
Installation photo from the exhibition. From the series: Picassos in lockdown, 2022. Photo: Camilla Stephan / Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.
HUMLEBÆK.—
At first glance, Sophie Calle's works may look as dry as a washing-machine manual. A second later, they whirl you in. From 26 March, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark will present an exhibition of seven major series and other works by the French artist. Totalling more than 300 individual parts – photographs, texts and videos – the exhibition fills the museum’s West Wing.
Over five decades, Sophie Calle (b. 1953) has created a prodigious body of work about navigating the world. About being human. About interpersonal connections, the inner and outer worlds, fiction and fact. The exhibition features works spanning nearly 40 years, from 1986-2024.
Themes of love, longing, memory, beauty, absence and presence are central to the exhibition and to Calle’s art overall. Another recurring motif is the relationship between the visible and the invisible, sight and blindness, the development of internal images and visual memories. A central piece in the exhibition is The Blind (1986), an early key work acquired for the Louisiana’s collection in 2024 and now on display for the first time at the museum.
Images and words
Working in photography and text, Calle is above all a storyteller. In her trademark constellations of images and words, she tackles life’s big questions with warmth, incisive humour, poetry and conceptual rigour.
According to the artist, she makes art about banal things. While this might be true, it is far from the whole story. The candour with which she approaches her works and their themes is liberating, while the perpetual interplay of language and image, fiction and fact, private and public, reflects the very act of perceiving and comprehending the world. The banal and the philosophical go hand in hand.
The exhibition is organised in close collaboration with the artist, who has been part of the Louisiana’s collection and history since 2008. Over the years, Calle’s works have appeared regularly in presentations of the collection, and in 2010 the artist had her first solo show at the museum, Take Care of Yourself.
Building on past presentations, Something Missing? reveals new facets of Calle’s art, featuring works not previously shown in Denmark or exhibited together – a treat for her many fans and an opportunity for new generations to encounter her work. Calle realises her works in both French and English. The English-language versions will be presented in this exhibition.
Featured works
The exhibition presents seven major series, culminating in a focused selection of works revolving around the artist’s death. Below are Calle’s own brief introductions to each series:
Because, 2018-2023
Curtains conceal the images, and embroidered texts reveal the motivations behind each photograph.
Picassos in lockdown, 2022
For the 50th anniversary of Pablo Picasso's death, the Musée Picasso in Paris invited me to create a show in dialogue with the artist. I hesitated: I could not face the overwhelming presence of his work. When the museum closed due to the covid pandemic, the paintings were covered for protection. Wrapped up, hidden – a ghost-like, less intimidating presence that I immediately photographed.
On the Hunt, 2017-2024
A catalogue of the qualities most desired in women by men, and in men by women, drawn from a selection of personal ads published mainly in Le Chasseur français between 1895 and 2010. For the years 2017 and 2019, it concludes with messages from the dating app Tinder. I have combined these texts with images presented in double-sided frames: on one side, photographs of hunting stands; on the other, nighttime images of animals captured by motion-activated cameras. Hunter and prey?
What do you see?, 2013
On March 18, 1990, after the theft of artworks from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the frames of paintings by Vermeer, Flinck and Rembrandt were left behind. These were then restored and put back in position, further emphasizing the absence of the works. I asked the curators, guards, other staff members and visitors to tell me what they saw within these frames.
The Blind, 1986
I met people who were born blind. Who had never seen. I asked them what their image of beauty was.
Voir la mer, 2011
In Istanbul, a city surrounded by the sea, I met people who had never seen it. I filmed their first time.
Catalogue raisonné of the unfinished, 2023
But when my life comes to an end, what will become of all the ideas that went nowhere, waiting for their moment in drawers and boxes? Before I disappear, I decided to inventory the drafts, the attempts, the abandoned projects. To give life to my intentions. To finish the unfinished.
The End
Selected works from 2013-2023 centring on the artist’s death.
Curator: Tine Colstrup
Catalogue: The exhibition will be accompanied by an English-language catalogue featuring new essays by Laurie Anderson and Yve-Alain Bois, as well as a new interview with Sophie Calle by Édouard Louis. In very different ways, the texts all bring us closer to Calle and her work.
