The Big Sleep 8, 1991

Jürgen Klauke is an influential photographer, widely attributed as being one of the first to be involved in Performance Art. He has contributed significantly to the development of photography as contemporary art. His avant-garde and actionist images focus on the human body in staged settings, which often appear surreal. Jürgen Klauke studied at the Werkschulen in Cologne and, from 1964 to 1970, he taught photography and art in Kassel. In the 1970s Jürgen Klauke’s photographic images were based around his own body and his performances. In a series of large-scale images he challenged what was at that time a traditional view of sexual identity and opposed social expectations of behavior. There was a darker mood revealed in many of his photography of the early 1980s and in the late 1980s he began a series of x-ray images of his own body. Some of his art deals with how physical identity and self awareness are constantly under threat from what is portrayed in the media and other outside influences. His series Aesthetic Paranoia is a pictorial analogy of the self obscured and bound by paranoia, sometimes becoming entangled with it. Jürgen Klauke has had a profound influence on the art of the late twentieth and early twenty-first-century. From 1993 to 2008, he was a professor at the Art Academy of Media in Cologne. (Artist website)