CHRISTIAN MARCLAY

The Kunstmuseum Thun presents the first comprehensive retrospective of the artist and experimental musician Christian Marclay (b. 1955). A total of around 60 works from 1980 to the present day are on display, ranging from collages and sculptures to installations and videos. Marclay’s remarkable body of work reflects the artist’s aim: to bridge the gap between what we hear and what we see, and to examine the social context that links these two forms of perception. Marclay’s diverse oeuvre masterfully combines contemporary music with visual art and performance.

Over the past 20 years, Marclay has experimented with a wide variety of media – including everyday objects such as loudspeakers, telephone handsets and magnetic tapes – and used them to create a multitude of sculptures. More recent sculptures take the form of unusual musical instruments, several examples of which are featured in the exhibition. Altered in form and grotesquely distorted, these instruments are technically unplayable. A central work in the exhibition is the critically acclaimed video Quartet, 2002. The large-scale DVD projection, shown simultaneously on four screens, combines excerpts from hundreds of old Hollywood films in which actors or musicians produce simple sounds or play an instrument. The result is both a moving image collage and a musical composition reminiscent of John Cage, hip-hop riffs or Appropriation Art.

The exhibition was organised by the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and has previously been shown in Los Angeles, New York and Seattle. Thun is the first stop in Europe (Avignon and London will follow) and the only venue for the exhibition in the German-speaking world. The fact that this retrospective is being shown in Switzerland is of particular significance, as the New York-based artist hails from Geneva, where he studied at the Ecole Supérieure d’Art Visuel. In 1995, Christian Marclay represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale, and his work has been featured in many major international exhibitions, including: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Whitney Museum, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Kunstmuseum Zürich, among others.

Catalogue (in English) with texts by Russell Ferguson, Douglas Kahn, Miwon Kwon and Alan Licht, published by the UCLA Hammer Museum, ISBN 3-88243-931-9, price CHF 48.–