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In a post-structuralist tradition, language is Claude Closky's preferred instrument. While his work takes on various forms; ranging from painting to websites, as drawing, collage, photography, and video he continuously observes media and the world of communication to produce a critical, and humorous, attempt to exhaust dominant models of representation and question our identities.
The INSIDE/OUT public programme of lectures invites speakers and leading thinkers whose breadth of work, practice, thought and collaboration we feel will inspire all our students and staff across the wide range of disciplines in the Leeds School of Arts.
Claude Closky is a Studio Professor at Beaux-Arts de Paris. Claude is one of France's leading artists and is renowned for his artist's books as well as a previous winner of the Marcel Duchamp prize, the French equivalent of the UK’s Turner prize (2005) and Les Grandes Prize des Artes Plastiques (1999).
Dike Blair wrote in Artforum Magazine that "The lightness of Closky's art belies the depth of its absurdist heredity. Working in a post-modernist mode, Closky's art works combine aspects of the Situationists, Fluxus, Beckett, Tall, Daniel Buren and Andy Warhol."
The work of Claude Closky is mainly immaterial. Language is his model to articulate images, text, numbers, and sounds collected in our environment, or made in his studio. Although Closky is reluctant to produce objects and spectacular effects, his work still addresses issues about visibility and space appropriation.
Claude Closky's projects always find alternative ways to emancipate themselves from the formats imposed by the sites where they are exhibited. He seeks to point out the contradictions of our contemporary society and its representations, but also to question the role of art as producer of a cultural consensus and set of values. His works confront and question our environment, the conditions and benefits of artistic production, its relation to an audience.
