Working across a variety of media, Claudia Comte injects play and the illusion of insouciance (Sorglosigkeit) into the rigorous geometries of modernist traditions. Past projects by the artist include an outdoor fun fair for Art Basel, featuring participatory activities such as arm wrestling, mini-golf, bowling, and darts; a site-specific work featuring six-ton Carrara marble bunny forms installed in Manhattan’s City Hall Park; and a solo exhibition of block-striped partitions and paintings, incorporating Comte’s idiosyncratic chainsaw sculptures. Comte has long been interested in wall painting as a site of intermedia transformation. Comte’s Curves and Zig Zags, installed in the Palm Desert for Desert X, superimposed graphic painting onto a moiréd three-dimensional structure. For the CAM Project Wall, Comte installs her most complex wallpainting to date, a pattern of hard-edge lines that appear to morph into an algorithm of sharp zigzags.
Claudia Comte (b. 1983, Grancy, Switzerland) lives and works in Berlin and Grancy. Comte has shown her work in solo and group exhibitions including: Swiss Performance Now, Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2018); KölnSkulpture #9, Cologne, Germany (2017); La Ligne Claire, Basement Rome (2017); NOW I WON, Messeplatz, Art Basel (2017); 10 Rooms, 40 Walls, 1059 m2, Kunstmuseum Lucerne, Switzerland (2017); Desert X, Palm Springs, California (2017); Catch The Tail By The Tiger, König Galerie, Berlin (2016); The Language of Things, with the Public Art Fund, New York (2016); NO MELON NO LEMON, Gladstone Gallery, New York (2015); Easy Heavy III, Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich (2014); Sharp Sharp at David Dale Gallery, Glasgow (2014); If I were a rabbit, where would I keep my gloves?, BolteLang, Zurich (2013); and Elevation 1049, Gstaad, Switzerland (2013). Comte studied at the Ecole Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne, Switzerland, ECAL (2004–07) followed by a Masters of Art in Science of Education at Haute Ecole Pédagogique, Visual Arts, Lausanne, (2008–10).
Claudia Comte: Electric Burst (Lines and Zigzags) is organized for the Contemporary Art Museum
St. Louis by Lisa Melandri, Executive Director.
