Jürgen Klauke is a pioneer of conceptual, staged photography and has been a formative influence on its strategies of performance and body art since the early 1970s. He often puts his body at the center of formally composed tableaux, sequences, and pictorial spaces, using it as a vessel to test the boundaries between life and art, to challenge conventional social roles and gender identities. Since the 1980s, his work has explored recurring existential questions. Klauke’s approach emphasizes the moment of friction, of being caught in the middle, and represents a singular position in contemporary art. The sequence of photographs Dr. Müllers Sex-Shop oder so stell ich mir die Liebe vor (1977/2018) ironically confronts the domestic ideals of a consumer society while at the same time fundamentally reflecting on the human condition. Showcasing the human body – with its needs and flaws in a playful spectacle – the work brings the sexual liberation of the 1970s to mind, including the liberation of visual pleasure. Today the piece takes on contemporary relevance: where individual liberty is negotiated at the intersection of the private and the political.
