Talking Culture | My Colour on Your Plate

A conversation around My Colour on Your Plate

Paul McCarthy is widely considered to be one of the most influential and groundbreaking contemporary American artists. Born in 1945, and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, he first established a multi-faceted artistic practice, which sought to break the limitations of painting by using unorthodox materials such as bodily fluids and food. He has since become known for visceral, often hauntingly humorous work in a variety of mediums – from performance, photography, film and video, to sculpture, drawing and painting.

Born in 1953 in Paris, Sophie Calle is a French artist who has exhibited extensively throughout the world since the late 1970s. She has been described as a conceptual artist, a photographer, a movie director or even detective; but has developed a practice that is instantly recognizable for a distinct narrative and the frequent combination of images with text. Each of these projects can be seen as another chapter in a vast overall system of references and echoes where Calle often blurs the boundaries between the intimate and the public, reality and fiction, art and life. Since the late 1970s, Sophie Calle has merged image and narration. Her work methodically organizes an unveiling of reality – her own and that of others, while allocating a controlled part of this reality to chance.