Christian Marclay
Artist, crossing the borders between genres and practices, combining and remixing aspects of visual art, music and performance.
Marclay’s innovative work explores the juxtaposition between sound, photography, video, sculpture and other media. His installations display provocative musical and visual landscapes and have been included in exhibitions around the world including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate Modern London, Venice Biennale, Centre Pompidou Paris and Kunsthaus Zurich.
Over the past two decades, Marclay has created ambitious work in a variety of media. The video Guitar Drag (2000) features a Fender Stratocaster being dragged behind a pick-up truck along rough country roads in Texas. Video Quartet (2002) – a large, four-screen projection featuring hundreds of clips from old Hollywood films – represents a high point of his vision, an elaborate audio-visual collage that evokes pop culture, appropriation art and sampling. In 2010 he created The Clock from thousands of edited fragments, incorporating a vast range of films to create a 24-hour, single-channel video.
“Over thirty years, he has developed a practice that is part improvisation, and part adaptation; a paean to popular culture that venerates even as it sabotages. His flair for spotting coincidence and cliché, weaving them into a brand new piece with its own cadence, cannot but leave one dumbfounded.”
Lucy Davies, The Telegraph