Unfinished Business: Sophie Calle at Fraenkel

Taking the elevator up to the fourth floor, I slipped into Fraenkel for its afternoon opening, bumping into an acquaintance. Small talk quickly fell away. Sophie Calle’s trio of series on view Catalogue Raisonné of the Unfinished, Picassos in Lockdown, and Autobiographies, requires reading.

Calle’s favorite subject of course is herself. With frank literary panache, the septuagenarian French conceptualist flirts with narcissism so objectively and directly that the artist adeptly misses its darker connotations. One of the first photos in the room is a recent self-portrait of the artist, wearing a neutral expression and cat-eye glasses, standing astride the Mona Lisa—the most famous painting in the world. The artist-made frame of corrugated cardboard suggests an impermanence and temporality. Doubling down on those themes, the Da Vinci is not pictured installed on the wall at the Louvre, but plunked on an easel. A somewhat unflattering photo of Calle, here and elsewhere in the exhibition the artist doesn’t hesitate to poke fun at herself.

Catalogue Raisonné of the Unfinished (2025) is exactly what it says, those sanguine ideas for works that never quite made it. Graphite declarations across the top of the washed white wooden framed printed first-person prompts are then stamped at an angle with bureaucratic red ink. Altogether, they read as a conversation, each style of writing having a different voice and personality. The timid, erasable pencil scribbled on the top of the frames had the most quiet presence. I imagine this voice to be the hopeful one that originally set the artist down a particular pursuit. The red bold letters were harsh and authoritative, negating the concept definitively; the inner critic’s voice. And the black and white typed-print was the most neutral, a matter of fact description of the project, unprejudiced. Three styles of writing. Three ways to squeeze language into a pictorial format.

There was a lot of giggling in the room as the opening crowd made their way around each piece. Pausing to read, chuckle, and move on. The subjects and style of Calle’s stories were light-hearted and funny, like a Nancy Meyers romantic-comedy—beamingly lighthearted, if blithely privileged. My favorite was a video of a fly, titled Dumped in August (fleeting pain) (2025), sinisterly rubbing its palms together atop a café menu while a French love song crooned through noise-cancelling, bluetooth headphones. Subtitles appeared on the screen reading oh-so familiar breakup expressions, along the bruising lines of ”I’m just not that into you.” The monitor was vertically-oriented almost like a phone screen held upright, so the subtitles read like a text message. The visual elements in this video, and pretty consistently throughout Catalogue Raisonné of the Unfinished and Autobiographies were gently teasing, effortlessly clever, all washed with the dreamy false-starts of clearly failed artworks.

In another grouping, Calle superimposes herself into campy Mexican comic-book covers. “Calle,” the word for “street” in Spanish, makes it so her name figures into the melodrama of their titles. Again with her signature cat-eye sunglasses, she poses in exaggerated positions, mimicking but failing to convincingly match the dramatized, sexualized cartoon covers. It’s a goofy idea, Calle ultimately rejected by labeling it (accurately?) “ANECDOTAL” with her authoritative red stamp.

For Picassos in Lockdown (2022), Calle photographed Pablo Picasso paintings at the Musée National Picasso in Paris, all covered by the museum for protection during the pandemic closures in 2020. As in her self-portrait with the Mona Lisa, Calle again positions herself against a gargantuan, almost ridiculously famous male artist. In the text describing this series, Calle writes that she was too intimidated when she originally received the invitation from the museum, but once all the Picasso’s were covered, she felt liberated to act. These photographs of shrouded rectangles are beautiful for the simplicity of their execution.

In the final room, Autobiographies (2013-2023), Calle reflects on mortality and familial relationships with her characteristically acerbic wit. Writing and texts of all sorts again are interspersed throughout, and prop up these photographs: brass plaques with text, poster sized texts (framed and tilted at an angle), text printed on the inner bottom ledge of frames, text printed on transparencies and overlaid onto framed photos. Text and more text stuffed into every possible nook and cranny. A grainy, tightly cropped photo of a granite slab, was described by the accompanying text as a gravesite in Bolinas that Calle purchased for herself. She had desired a location in France, where she lives, but her chosen cemetery would not sell it to her while she was living—a logistical catch-22.

The strength of this exhibition is Calle’s ability to communicate her wit and humor through language. The visual (as opposed to textual) aspects of the show ranged from the deadpan to the listless. There was an unresolved tension between what needed to be an image and what could only be expressed through writing. It’s evident that the narratives are doing most of the heavy lifting here and that the bulk of the artist’s pleasures are derived from telling stories through language. In my opinion, the majority of the photographs paled in comparison to their jubilant descriptors. That being said, where café menus and French love songs share real estate with Mexican comic books and the Mona Lisa, it’s a delight to spend an afternoon inside Sophie’s head.

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