* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
Claire Fontaine is part of a Paris-based collective founded in 2004. She declared herself a “readymade artist” after lifting her name from a popular brand of exercise books and immediately set about elaborating on a neo-conceptual brand of art designed to resemble the work of others.
Her neon signs, videos, sculptures, paintings and text are an ongoing interrogation of the political impotence and the crisis of singularity that defines contemporary art. Fontaine regards herself as the subjective equivalent of a urinal or a Brillo box–displaced, deprived of its use value, and interchangeable as the objects she produces.
She uses her youth and controversial opinions to make herself a whatever-singularity and an existential terrorist, in search of self-defined emancipation. Her creative practice grows in a climate depraved of any notion of authorship, she explains. Fontaine experiments with collective protocols of production, détournements, and the production of devices for sharing intellectual and private property.
Her work has been exhibited at among others Arbeit Macht Kapital, Kubus, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, München, They Hate Us For Our Freedom, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Lucky In The Misfortune, Masion Descartes, Institut Français des Pays-Bas, Amsterdam, Feux de Détresse, and Galerie Chantal Crousel.
