At Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, the French photographer and conceptual artist Sophie Calle presents an assortment of initiatives deferred or deserted over the course of her 40-year profession. These ‘concepts which have gone nowhere’, as they’re described in an introductory wall textual content, are eventually ‘pronounced completed’, although one can by no means ensure. Calle’s model of ephemeral artwork intervention – usually produced in secret, with out individuals’ consent – would appear to evade any particular endpoint. Save one: loss of life.
Her method of organizing and, of late, terminating her artworks is remarkably unsentimental. Within the exhibition’s first room, Calle pairs a number of fragments and false begins with quick textual content panels explaining why she selected to maneuver on. There’s a photographic examine of equivalent twin brothers, Emmanuel and Maximilien Berque (Twins [Max died], 2025), dwelling by the seaside, nonetheless dressing alike into their 60s. Calle, who visited them yearly, declined to proceed the work after Max’s loss of life: ‘recreation over’, she writes. In one other venture, Sure (Infernal) (2025) – a composite {photograph} of the phrase ‘Oui’ skywritten on a transparent day – Calle toys with the liberty to make selections. For a complete month, she consented to something and every thing; however, after scrolling by way of her assistant’s inbox, she promptly modified course. ‘I might have taken seven planes,’ she complains, ‘attended 5 dinners in the identical night, accepted a nasty exhibition …’ Her adjudication? ‘INFERNAL.’ Every of Calle’s written descriptions of an deserted venture bears a stamp, in massive pink letters, with a conclusive assertion in the identical self-critical tone: ‘TOO LATE’; ‘WHAT’S THE POINT?’; ‘WRONG TURN’; ‘LOSS OF INTEREST’.
A second room is dedicated to the strongest work on view: the picture collection ‘Picassos in Lockdown’ (2022), which Calle made for the Musée Picasso in Paris. She was invited to create work in dialogue with the grasp’s drawings and work however felt overwhelmed on the prospect. May even her finest, most admired works face up to such a comparability? She agreed solely when the museum had shuttered quickly, and Picasso’s canvases – together with Portrait of Marie-Thérèse Walter (1937) and Portrait of Jacques Prévert (1956) – had been shrouded in fabric and brown paper: ‘much less intimidating’, in Calle’s phrases, like corpses in a morgue.
The third and closing room is totally different, extra emotive, much less an indication of Calle’s darkish sense of humour and exacting mind. Right here, she pays quiet homage to her topics – her mother and father, each deceased – with glum self-portraits and images of headstones, a number of of that are set in funereal cherrywood casements. Once more, there’s textual commentary. She writes of her father, lifeless at 94, ‘I needed him to have seen every thing.’ She relays just a few of his final phrases, together with ‘cypress’, ‘bathrooms’ and ‘morning’. Elsewhere she excerpts her diary. ‘My mom died right now,’ she wrote in 2006. Then: ‘Nobody will say this about me.’
Calle has been occupied with mortality for a while. Eight years in the past, she commissioned actor and author Adrian Dannatt to pen her obituary, which she shows right here in a shadowbox, obscured by a trio of preserved moths (Unexpected, 2017). However the humanistic drawback of ‘legacy’, which is talked about within the gallery’s press launch, shouldn’t be what Calle’s work evokes. Her fame as one of many nice postmodern image-makers testifies to one thing impersonal: her native tradition’s obsession with documentation and process, and the indefinite relation between an occasion or state of affairs, and the traces it leaves behind. As soon as declared completed, her artworks revert to the quotidian matter from which they emerged: receipts, printouts, picture negatives, carbon paper. In a wall textual content, she describes a life that ends whereas concepts are left ready ‘in drawers and bins’. Sooner or later they’ll be emptied and, ultimately, the contents will disintegrate.
‘Sophie Calle’ is on view at Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco till 12 April
Major picture: ‘Sophie Calle’, 2025, exhibition view. Courtesy: Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
