David Claerbout Belgian, 1969

David Claerbout (Kortrijk, Belgium 1969)

David Claerbout was born in 1969 in Kortrijk, Belgium. He studied at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and at the Rijksakademie of Visual Arts in Amsterdam. 

In 2007, David Claerbout was awarded the Will-Grohmann-Preis of the Berlin Akademie der Künste, and in 2010, he received the Peill-Preis of the Günther-Peill-Stiftung. He participated in the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program from 2002 to 2003.

Time and the sense of time are at the heart of David Claerbout's oeuvre. Since the mid-nineties, he has been exploring the boundaries between the still and moving image and often focuses on this contrast between standstill and movement in his works. In this way, Claerbout adds almost imperceptible movement to photographs or slows down cinematic images until they appear almost static.

In the series "The Algiers' Sections of a Happy Moment", which was created between 2008 and 2011 and to which this work also belongs, Claerbout shows children playing football in the sun on a large concrete square between high-rise buildings and being watched by older spectators. While this is a single image of Claerbout, showing one of the many images that were taken, Claerbout also creates slide projections:  the moment is captured in a variety of perspectives in hundreds of photographs and repeats itself continuously in the sequence of images of Claerbout's slide projection. However, the viewer's expectation that the moment will evaporate and time will pass is then gradually lost due to the continuous recurrence of the images.

Claerbout's works have been presented internationally in numerous solo exhibitions, including: Centraal Museum, Utrecht (2024); Pinchuk Art Centre, Kyiv (2024); Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei City (2023); Milwaukee Art Museum (2022); Pont Museum, Tilburg (2021); Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2021);  Museum of Art, Adelaide (2020) and Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague (2020);  Kunst Museum Winterthur (2020); Foundation of the Parasol Unit for Contemporary Art, Zuoz (2019–20); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz (2018).

His work is represented in important public collections worldwide, including: Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; SFMOMA, San Francisco; Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; ARC / Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris; MMK – Museum ofModern Art, Frankfurt; Städel Museum, Frankfurt; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

He lives and works in Antwerp and Berlin.

Copyright the artist. Photo UniCredit Bank GmbH