exhibited: 2016 JÜRGEN KLAUKE Einblick/Ausblick Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman, Innsbruck (Ö) 2016 Ich. Neue Formen des Selbstporträts, SCHIRN Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (D) 2018 Komödie des Daseins. Kunst und Humor von der Antike bis heute, Kunsthaus Zug (CH) 2020 SUBJEKT und OBJEKT. FOTO RHEIN RUHR Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (D) published: Martina Weinhart/ Max Hollein (Ed.), Ich, published on the occasion of the exhibition: Ich, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt from 10 March – 29 May 2016, Cologne 2016, p.61. Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland GmbH (ed.), Absolute Windstille. Jürgen Klauke – das Fotografische Werk, exhibition catalogue, Bonn 2001, p. 79. Jürgen Klauke speaks with the 70s works of the “aestheticization of the existential”, as well as with selected works like “Toter Fotograf” from 1988. Jürgen Klauke is considered a pioneer of performative, at the same time staged, at the same time conceptual photo art. Klaus Honnef describes him as one of the most distinctive representatives of body art. Not only a photographer, painter or draftsman, he represents the expanded concept of art of a transitional artist image that has been new since 1970 (between the media). He uses his body as a projection screen for ideas, as he defines it himself, as an “amplifier”” as a “”thinker”” or as a “”representative””. The long work process, from drawing to the sophisticated staging in front of the camera and aesthetic elaboration, shines through precisely the vacuum between art and life that the classic avant-garde sought to combine. After the removal of the taboo, the irony of a normally praised but increasingly absurd existence came to the fore in partly grotesque densifications. The mocking dissolution of the ego comes with the beautiful failure and the philosophy of the senseless versus the saturation of post-war consumption. Brigitte Borchardt-Birbaumer, Vienna 2012 The central figure, which the artist visualizes in his pictures, has a lot to do with him, but is not identical with the person of Jürgen Klauke. This is how you would completely misunderstand his pictures if you took them as a kind of self-portrait; the older series and sequences are at most approximate. In fact, they are condensed portraits of society, the reflection of others, including their viewers, more precisely: images of social and psychological syndromes and faulting, sometimes exaggerated into the grotesque or ironically accentuated. Jürgen Klauke negotiates elementary things in his art: the short circuits and disturbances in human communication, the widespread loss of meaning in life, the paralyzing emptiness and boredom of an unfulfilled existence, and not to forget the suggestive threats to mental and physical identity through the gentle violence of the media as well as the progressive mechanization of all areas of life; not excluding the field of the human body. If he occasionally ironically breaks the force of this agenda, he is documenting despair rather than distance and eliciting the viewer of his pictures not a liberating laugh, but one that quickly dies and brings about sudden self-knowledge: in the “”other”” artistic works of Jürgen Klauke you encounter yourself as a stranger. Klaus Honnef, Frankfurt 2013 in the course of the exhibition „Maskulinfeminin“ of the gallery Anita Beckers Frankfurt “