German, b. 1943; lives and works in Cologne, Germany
Using his body as an artistic medium, Jürgen Klauke explores and experiments with gender roles, identity, and sexuality. Dedicated to these complex phenomena, his photographic series resist straightforward interpretation, while questioning the individual’s position in society, as well as their relationship to social conventions. Quotidian objects, which symbolize or refer to normative stereotypes, appear in many of his staged images. For Klauke, the table in Gesichtsfeldeinengungen (Restrictions of the Field of Vision) represents a theater of everyday life—a place where humans eat, discuss, write, work, or argue—whereas the floating hats rather ambiguously allude to gender roles. This dialectic between reality and illusion is characteristic of Klauke’s works.
