Jürgen Klauke

Opening: Thursday, 3 April, 6 – 9 PM

The artist will be present

Zander Galerie Paris is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition dedicated to Jürgen Klauke. Titled Transformer, the exhibition will showcase a selection of seminal photographs from the early 1970s. These works, central to Klauke’s artistic and philosophical exploration, challenge conventional notions of gender and its representation.

Born in 1943 in Germany, Jürgen Klauke is a pioneer of conceptual and staged photography. Since the late 1960s, he has put his own body at the service of his artistic practice, pushing the boundaries of the photographic medium while interrogating the social and psychological constructs that shape human existence. Rather than documenting these tensions, Klauke transforms them into meticulously composed visual statements—a process he defines as the “aestheticization of the existential”. Through this approach, he elevates personal and societal conflict into an artistic language where alienation, identity, and the absurd become both subject and material.

Transformer presents a selection of key works created between 1972 and 1975, where the artist deconstructs established norms and sharply questions the mechanisms of ready-made thinking that define our identities and perceptions. Using his own body as a pictorial material, he creates staged photographs that transcend the self-portrait. These images offer a conceptual reflection on stereotypes and social constructs. Through plays on gender ambiguity, provocative postures, and a meticulously orchestrated aesthetic, the artist disrupts conventional readings of the body and the roles assigned to identities. This critical approach dismantles rigid categories and urges a radical reassessment of cultural certainties, using irony and the grotesque to expose the fractures within an oppressive normative system. Klauke thus aligns himself with a lineage of artists and intellectuals—from Duchamp to Bataille, from Artaud to Buñuel—who have wielded subversion as a means against the standardisation of thought. In Transformer, photography becomes a site of experimentation, a battleground against imposed identities, and a space of freedom.

“Neither ideology, nor morality, nor reason are categories that drive our artistic work forward. Disagreement, subversion, rule violations, and overstrain are essential components of our actions. Art deviates and creates contradictions and conflicts. In the best case, it deepens and broadens perception. Thus, the project of art, freed from the laws of logic, has become usable – in successful cases, the Sisyphean task is transformed into something insightful.”— Jürgen Klauke

Jürgen Klauke has lived and worked in Cologne since 1968 and was a professor at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne from 1994 to 2008. He has participated in major international exhibitions, including Documenta 6 (1977) and Documenta 8 (1987) in Kassel, as well as the Venice Biennale in 1980. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in prestigious instituions worldwide, including Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Max Ernst Museum, Brühl; Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn; Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; ZKM, Karlsruhe; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg; Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf; Museum Boymans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; The Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, Shiga & Yamaguchi Museum, Japan; The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg; and Tate Liverpool.

His works are part of renowned international collections, including the Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Kunstsammlung NRW/K21, Düsseldorf; Kunstmuseum Bonn; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; Art Institute of Chicago and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Additional collections include Helga de Alvear Foundation, Cáceres; MOMA Saitama, Tokyo; Sammlung Hall, USA; La Maison Rouge, Paris; Norton Museum of Art, Florida; Sammlung Goetz, Munich; Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva; Sammlung Falkenberg, Hamburg; and Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg.