Jürgen Klauke: Transformer: Photoworks from the 1970s

Koenig & Clinton is pleased to present historic works by German artist Jürgen Klauke. Transformer: Photoworks from the 1970s features multiple series that subvert conventional models of gender, self-representation, sexuality, and identity; it is also the artist’s first solo exhibition in a New York gallery.

This presentation includes a selection of color- and black-and-white photographs from distinct bodies of work produced between 1970 and 1976. Klauke’s staged photographs from this period predominantly feature images of the artist as a spectacularly costumed, androgynous, and/or deformed figure. Each suite of images systematically deconstructs the conventional persona of the male artist. Among the works on view, Klauke’s iconic Transformer series captures him in a variety of confrontational poses and gender-ambiguous guises.

Klauke is widely acknowledged as a leading figure in Performance Art and foundational to Body Art. His work has influenced subsequent generations of artists working across media in interdisciplinary practices. His use of cinematographic sequence and the tableau in photography underscores the theatricality of his staged performances, in which the artist’s body serves as a surface for the projection of multiple identities and sexes. As a result, the photographs featuring Klauke’s own body are not self-portraits, but rather, representations of the self as something else.

As noted by art historian, critic, and curator Klaus Honnef, Klauke addresses “the suggestive danger to mental and physical identity through the power of media as well as the developing mechanization of all areas of life – not excluding the area of the human body.”

Beginning in the 1960s, Jürgen Klauke (b. 1943 in Kliding near Chochem/Mosel, Germany) started to make his own body the instrument and projection surface of his artistic ideas. He also experimented with minimalism and surrealism in drawings about his depth psychological reflections. He lives and works in Cologne.

Klauke studied graphic arts at the Kölner Werkschulen from 1964 to 1970 and participated at documenta 8 and had solo shows i.a.: 1987 Museum Ludwig, Köln; 1988 Prosecuritas, Very de Nada, Halle Süd, Genf; 1992 Sonntagsneurosen, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden; 1997, Phantomempfindung, The Museum of Modern Art, Saitama & Shiga, The Yamaguchi Prefectural Museum of Art, Yamaguchi, Japan; 2010 Jürgen Klauke. Aesthetic Paranoia, ZKM / Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe, then: Museum der Moderne Salzburg.