Christian Marclay

Christian Marclay works across numerous visual media - sculpture, installation, performance, found object, and collage - alongside music and its artefacts, to create a unique, multidisciplinary art. Also a musician, composer and DJ, in his visual works he sometimes evokes the memory of music, such as The Beatles (1989), a pillow crocheted out of Beatles audiotapes. Elsewhere Marclay examines the clichéd images of music-making, for example those found on LP record covers: charismatic, classical music conductors; anonymous, smiling Easy Listening girls; sultry rock stars. These are then carefully sewn together to form hybrid, often humorous, 'spliced'-together figures (Body Mix, 1980-ongoing). A major travelling retrospective of the artist originated at the Hammer Museum, UCLA and travels to the Barbican Art Gallery, London, in February 2005. The highlight of this exhibition is Marclay's tour de force Video Quartet (2003), a four-screen installation combining (mostly) Hollywood film clips associated with music, edited together with virtuoso precision. A respected musician who has collaborated with John Zorn, Elliot Sharp, and others, Marclay has presented his unique sound-and-vision at the Whitney Biennial, New York, 1991 and 2002; the Venice Biennale, 1995 and 1999, among many key international exhibitions.