Sophie Calle is internationally renowned for using aspects of her personal life as a source of inspiration. Her work is about exploring human relations using provocative, sometimes even controversial methods, since her narrations —often told through photographs, videos and text— reveal, or at least seem to reveal, the artist's very own intimacy and that of those surrounding her. NEW YORK—The Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to present the first U.S. exhibition of Sophie Calle’s Take Care of Yourself, a body of work created for the French Pavilion of the 2007 Venice Biennale. The show will open on 9 April 2009 and will remain on view through May at 534 West 21st Street. There’s something of the “quirky” about her, of course, that word used so often as a dismissive pat on the head of women that tell intimate female stories. But, even in the shadow of a giraffe that is her mother, her eccentricity is the last thing you notice. She warns me she compiles journalists mistakes for a

Take Care of Yourself,” Installation View. Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, NY. Photo: Ellen Wilson. Calle won't say who dumped her, only that there is a one-word clue at the start of the book of the exhibition. Did he approve? "He knew about it. He didn't like the idea, but he respected it. So he decided not to meddle."The closer Calle came to capturing Henri B., the more anguished she felt that he wouldn’t match up to the chimera she had conjured of him. “I’m afraid that the encounter might be commonplace. I don’t want to be disappointed,” she writes. In “The Hotel,” traces of Calle show up in little asides that trouble the project’s patina of neutrality; of a pair of pants drying in the shower, she writes, “Symbolic, they reflect the tedium that prevails in this room. Unless it’s just my own weariness.” Throughout, she takes care to show us that she is closer to the center of this story than she may seem. A chance encounter with a handsome guest in the hallway inspires a new plotline in which she is no longer the invisible maid but the protagonist: “For the first time, I imagine for a few seconds a patron taking an interest in my plight.” An Enquiry Concerning Questionable Practices within the Scientific Methodologies of the Sleepytime Gorilla Museum By Kurt Gottschalk In 2017 she was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize for her publication My All (Actes Sud, 2016). [8] [9] In 2019 she was the recipient of the Royal Photographic Society's Centenary Medal and Honorary Fellowship. CALLE: I made the film of my mother’s death really because of Robert Storr. He invited me to show in the Italian Pavilion at the same time that I was occupying the French Pavilion. Initially, for the French Pavilion, I had the idea to work on absence, perhaps because of the nostalgia ofVenice—about missing persons, missing things . . . a b "Deutsche Börse Photograpohy Foundation Prize 2017". The Photographers' Gallery. Archived from the original on 2017-01-09.

Since 2005, Calle has taught as a professor of film and photography at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. She has lectured at the University of California, San Diego in the Visual Arts Department. [4] She has also taught at Mills College in Oakland, California.The sheer variety of responses, from the potentially illuminating to the absurd, all adhere to Calle's use of a conceptual constraint. In this instance, it involved the artist taking the letter's advice at its word - to take care of her self - via 107 different interpretations. The constraints, or rules, that Calle uses as starting points often allow for chance results, and as here, often make public the artist's emotional life. In this instance, Calle turns a humiliating rejection into a liberating celebration of feminine solidarity. Dallow, Jessica, "CALLE, Sophie: French photographer and installation artist," Contemporary Women Artists. St. James Press, 1999. Greenough, Sarah; Nelson, Andrea; Kennel, Sarah; Waggoner, Diane; Ureña, Leslie (2015). The Memory of Time: Contemporary Photographs at the National Gallery of Art. National Gallery of Art. ISBN 978-0-500-54449-5. Calle's work is distinguished by its use of arbitrary sets of constraints, and evokes the French literary movement of the 1960s known as Oulipo, where a group of Conceptual writers used similar constraints in literature. Devising "rules" for her own self-compelled games was a regular starting point for her explorations into the human condition.

Phaidon Editors (2019). Great women artists. Phaidon Press. p.82. ISBN 978-0714878775. {{ cite book}}: |last1= has generic name ( help) CALLE: I know that when I started to be happy with a man, everyone said, “God, this pink period is going to be a disaster for you!” [ laughs] Sophie Calle, Take Care of Yourself, 2007 (installation view of French Pavilion at 52nd Venice Biennale). Courtesy Perrotina b c d e f O'Hagan, Sean (4 March 2017). "Strangers, secrets and desire: the surreal world of Sophie Calle". The Guardian. London . Retrieved 4 March 2017. Fabian Stech, J'ai parlé avec Lavier, Annette Messager, Sylvie Fleury, Hirschhorn, Pierre Huyghe, Delvoye, D.F.-G. Hou Hanru, Sophie Calle, Yan Pei-Ming, Sans et Bourriaud. Presses du réel Dijon, 2007. Appointment with Sigmund Freud. London: Thames & Hudson; London: Violette, 2005. ISBN 9780500511992. Gabrielle Moser, 'Working-through' public and private labour: Sophie Calle's Prenez soin de vous' n.paradoxa:international feminist art journal vol.27 January 2011 pp.5–13. Demonstrating this variance in how the accounts panned out is that a writer commented on the style of the letter, a justice issued an objective judgement, a lawyer acted in defence of the ex-lover, a mediator attempted to build a path to reconciliations, and a proofreader provided a literal edit of the text, with it investigated in every way possible.