Claire Fontaine is a Paris-based artist collective, founded in 2004. After lifting her name from a popular brand of school notebooks, Claire Fontaine declared herself a “readymade artist” and began to develop a version of neo-conceptual art that often looks like other people’s work. Working in neon, video, sculpture, painting and text, her practice can be described as an ongoing interrogation of the political impotence and the crisis of singularity that seem to define contemporary art today. But if the artist herself is the subjective equivalent of a urinal or a Brillo box – as displaced, deprived of its use value, and exchangeable as the products she makes – there is always the possibility of what she calls the “human strike.” Claire Fontaine uses her freshness and youth to make herself a whatever-singularity and an existential terrorist in search of subjective emancipation. She grows up among the ruins of the notion of authorship, experimenting with collective protocols of production, détournements, and the production of various devices for the sharing of intellectual and private property.

Recent shows include Future Tense, El Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico D.F.; Economies, Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; No Family Life, Air de Paris, Paris; Fighting Gravity, Regina Gallery, London and Moscow; P.I.G.S., MUSAC Contemporary Art Museum, Castilla y León, Spain; Where Do We Migrate To?, Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture, Baltimore; PhotoMonth, Bunker Stuzki Contemporary Art Museum, Krakow; Network, Mastermind, Casablanca; and Relationship Building, Kunstlerhaus Wien, Vienna. Claire Fontaine is represented by Reena Spaulings Fine Art and Metro Pictures, New York; T293, Napoli and Rome; Galerie Neu, Berlin; and Galerie Chantal Crousel / Air de Paris, Paris. She is now preparing a catalogue with Buchhandlung Walther König.