An elegant compendium of Calle's unfinished, abandoned or "failed" works of art

"I have a horror of the finished. Death is final. The gunshot is final. The almost finished is life," said Pablo Picasso. "But," replies Sophie Calle, "when everything stops, what will become of the ideas that stagnate, that wait their time in boxes, in coffins? Before disappearing, it's necessary to make an inventory of sketches, attempts and abandonments, and bring intentions to life. A way of ending things."
This volume follows the artist's 2024 exhibition À toi de faire, ma mignonne at the Musée Picasso in Paris, marking the first time that French artist Sophie Calle has showcased a selection of her unfinished or abandoned projects, which she also understands as her failures. These stories, stamped with a verdict in red indicating the reason for their incompleteness, offer a mirror to her True Stories, a book regularly reissued since 1994. In this eventful collection, which reveals all the submerged aspects of a body of work spanning several decades, we find the main motifs of her work, such as chance, chance encounters and, above all, her key idea of incompletion as a result, trial and failure as corollaries of artistic action--an echo of Picasso's philosophy from decades ago. In this book, Calle takes stock of a lifetime of artistic creation, and hints at future challenges.
Sophie Calle (born 1953) is an internationally renowned artist whose controversial works often fuse conceptual art and Oulipo-like constraints, investigatory methods and the plundering of autobiography. The Whitechapel Gallery in London organized a retrospective in 2009, and her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Hayward Gallery and Serpentine, London; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among others. She lives and works in Paris.