Curator: Agustín Pérez Rubio
Opening: Monday 2 March at 7.30 pm

Over the last four decades, this French conceptual artist has explored her relationship with others and with herself in an endeavour to fashion a way of looking and a quest for personal development. Her pieces are always written in the first person singular, but her relationship with others forms an implicit part of her search for beauty and art in all its facets.

With this in mind, the exhibition is laid out in two parts. The first section presents work in which the artist scrutinises others and otherness by fashioning ways of looking and by searching for beauty. It opens with the series The Blinds (1986), the only piece that formed part of the last major show on Sophie Calle in Spain, at ”la Caixa” Foundation in Madrid and Barcelona (1996–1997). She not only explores the subject of blindness but also asks how we remember what is no longer there and what defines identity and beauty in the sea, a picture or a person.

The second section presents projects on one of the central themes in her work: the relationship between real-life personal stories and fiction. It includes the series Autobiographies, with different episodes narrated by the artist herself, and her biggest installation to date, Take Care of Yourself (2007), which was on show at the French pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The exhibition ends in the former dining room at the Palau de la Virreina, which Sophie Calle turns into a room of her own, filling it with objects that shape her as an artist and revealing how she experiences love and desire and how she relates to others and to art.

Since the late 1970s, Sophie Calle has merged image and narration. Her work methodically organizes an unveiling of reality – her own and that of others, while allocating a controlled part of this reality to chance. The theme of absence is central to her work.

From the beginning, she has exhibited in galleries and international museums. A major exhibition entitled “À suivre” was held in 1991 at ARC / Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris. In April 2001, she presented “Twenty Years Later” at Galerie Perrotin, a project which reactivates that of “The Shadow” (1981): “On April 16, 1981, at my request, my mother went to a detective agency. She hired them to follow me, to report my daily activities, and to provide photographic evidence of my existence. Twenty years later, on April 16, 2001, I was followed by a private detective of the Duluc agency who had been hired by Emmanuel Perrotin.”

In 2003, a Sophie Calle retrospective titled “M’as-tu vue” (“Did you See Me?”) was organised by the Centre Pompidou (then travelled to the Martin- Gropius-Bau, Berlin, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin and the Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen, Germany). For “Take Care of Yourself” at the 2007 Venice Biennale, Sophie Calle invites women to interpret a breakup email. The artist orchestrates these interpretations by combining texts, photographs and videos. This exhibition then travelled to the Bibliothèque nationale de France and throughout twenty museums across the world.

More recently, “Rachel, Monique” dealt with the death of her mother. Different versions of the exhibition were exhibited at Palais de Tokyo (2010), the Avignon Festival (2012), the Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest in New York (2014), and currently at Castello di Rivoli in Torino, “MAdRE” until 15 February 2015. The exhibition “Last Seen”, recently exhibited at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston echoed a 1991 series of the same title, also linked with Museum collections.

In 2010, Sophie Calle was the recipient of the Hasselblad Award for photography. In the forthcoming months, several solo exhibitions of her work will be on view, such as “For the Last and First Time” at the Musée d’Art contemporain, Montréal (5 February - 10 May 2015), or the retrospective “Sophie Calle. Modus vivendi” at La Virreina Image Centre, Barcelona (3 March - 7 June 2015).