Sophie Calle, “Overshare”

by Liz Goldner

UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, California

Continuing through May 24, 2026

Sophie Calle, “Room 43” from “The Hotel,” 1981. Courtesy of Siglio Press

Commentaries about this exhibition barely prepare viewers for its depth, expansiveness and especially for its sheer fearlessness. The show by French conceptual artist Sophie Calle (b. 1953) presents projects that she calls “The Spy,” “The Sleepers,” “The Protagonist” and “True Stories,” among others. The several galleries are inundated with photos and extensive text that reveal her voyeuristic perspective. These pieces compel the adventurous inquisitor to peruse every photo and the thousands of words on the walls.

Calle’s projects are seductive, challenging our normal personal boundaries, springing from her intense desire to explore the vicissitudes of human nature. Her body of work, created over the course of five decades, probes humanity’s relationships, emotions and frailty, with the artist serving as a key component of the ventures. Each detailed written description is as essential a feature of her larger oeuvre as her photos.

Sophie Calle, “The Sleepers (Gennie Michelet, thirteenth sleeper),” 1979, 11 black and white photographs, each: 6 x 7 7/8”, overall: 12 x 47 1/4”. Courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

“The Spy” is a decades-long project in which she assumes roles and spies on others’ personal lives. She has worked as a housekeeper in classy hotels, opening visitors’ drawers and suitcases, looking at their clothes, shoes and underwear, examining the beds they sleep in, the toiletries they leave in the bathrooms, and even the trash the throw out. She obsessively photographs and writes about her findings. By exhibiting the fruits of her discoveries in galleries and museums, she invites us to become co-conspirators in her secretive scenarios.

Sophie Calle, “In Memory of Frank Gehry's Flowers,” 2014, pigment print with hand-cut edge, accompanied by eleven two-sided photographs & vase designed by Frank Gehry, 78 x 54 1/2 x 9 1/2”. Courtesy of the artist and Gemini G.E.L.

As part of this project, she surreptitiously follows people on the streets. One of her ”Spy” sketches reads, “Concealing my emotions, I determinedly cross the piazza, circle around the monument, and pretend to study it. I feel his eyes on me. I walk along the hospital’s right wing. There’s an alcove. Finally, I’ll be out of his sight.” This and many other sketches reveal Calle’s relentlessly self-observing nature, which she mines for the resulting text and photo-based art.

“The Protagonist” series, begun in the 1980s, is centered on her own life. As she goes about her daily activities into the evening and early morning, visiting the Louvre, a café, talking with strangers on the street, some of whom take her picture, attending a movie, a party, taking a taxi home in the early morning hours, she serves as her own archivist. It is difficult to imagine living an endlessly interesting, glamorous life while writing down nearly every detail, but Calle does just that. The catalog explains that these sketches can be curious, moving, embarrassing, funny, or a combination. An example: “At 2:10 p.m., I move on. I cross the Pont Royal and head for the Louvre. At 2:20, after walking quickly through the museum, I find myself in front of Titian’s ‘Man with a Glove.’”

Sophie Calle, “Room with a View,” 2003, pigment print mounted on aluminum, 67 x 51”. Courtesy of the artist.

“The Sleepers,” begun in 1979, is among the most curious of Calle’s series. The artist is seen asking various people, many of whom she has just met, to sleep in her bed. Surprisingly, several people agree to do so — perhaps because this project happened in Paris when mores were looser than they are today. She wrote about one participant: “He goes to bed without changing the sheets. He regrets not having brought his cat, of not finding someone in the bed at his arrival since he likes coincidences and sly looks. He says he was sleepy when he arrived, he yawned when he saw the name of the street. But he doesn’t sleep.” Observing a person, particularly one of the opposite sex inhabiting one’s own bed, and writing about it, invites us to superimpose our own fantasies — sexual and allegorical — onto the piece.

“The Razor Blade,” an individual work in her “True Stories” project, relates Calle’s brief gig posing nude for a drawing class. She tells of a male student who drew her for three hours every day for 12 days. At the end of each session, he brandished a razor blade that he used to slash his drawing to pieces, left it on the table as evidence and left the room. Apparently disenchanted by his performance, Calle made the 12th day in class her last one.

Sophie Calle, “Mother-Father,” 2018, pigment print, embroidered woolen cloth, wooden box, 16 7/8 x 222 5/8 x 2 5/8”. Courtesy of the artistr and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

As her fame and notoriety spread, Calle met architect Frank Gehry in Los Angeles in 1984. He offered to be her impresario and sent her flowers on the opening days of her exhibitions, all of which she photographed. These photos, along with a picture of the dead flowers, are displayed as a memorial to Gehry, who died at age 96 in December.

There are those who regard Calle as an exhibitionist who transformed her bizarre adventures into amusements for the well-heeled. By the 2000s she was a celebrity performance artist. For “Room with a View” (2002), from her “Autobiographies” series, she spent a night in a room set up for her at the top of the Eiffel Tower. For eight hours, this free spirit lay in bed up there, welcoming hundreds of strangers, each of whom spent five minutes at her bedside telling her a story. The project concluded at 7:00 a.m. when she returned to earth. She wrote, “As if to confirm that I hadn’t dreamt it all. I asked for the moon and I got it.”

Liz Goldner is an award-winning art writer based in Laguna Beach. She has contributed to the LA Times, LA Weekly, KCET Artbound, Artillery, AICA-USA Magazine, Orange County Register, Art Ltd. and several other print and online publications. She has written reviews for ArtScene and Visual Art Source since 2009. 

Liz Goldner’s Website.