To open the fall season, Paula Cooper Gallery will present Christian Marclay’s recent video installation, Subtitled (2019). Previously exhibited as part of Marclay’s 2022-2023 survey at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, this will be the United States premiere of the work.

Subtitled expands on Marclay’s virtuosic mastery of filmic collage, known from his previous video works Telephones (1995), The clock (2010), 48 war movies (2019), and Doors (2022), among others. In this work, twenty-two cinematic fragments, cropped from the bottom of the film’s frame, are stacked vertically and displayed on a stele-like freestanding LED screen soaring to a height of nearly 20 feet. Extracts of dialogue and closed captions appear intermittently as subtitles merge with visual themes and color palettes, briefly approaching cohesion before quickly dispersing into abstraction. The constant movement draws the eye up and down in search of narrative continuity and the fragments provide cryptic and atmospheric clues as to their origins, disallowing easy identification. Instead, Subtitled forms a mesmerizing, flickering and fluid concrete poem, of uncertain outcome and infinite possibility.

Marclay has explored the potential of implied sound in previous works such as Surround Sounds (2014-15), an installation animated by onomatopoeic phrases from comic books, and his Body Mix series of record covers collaged to form strange, hybrid superstars. In each case, Marclay’s use of collage combines visual recognition with the shock of contextual transformation, delighting in chance encounters much like the surrealist game of exquisite corpse. Subtitled builds upon these predecessors with particular implications for the contemporary moment, encouraging reflection on an overwhelmingly mediated reality through a meditative and unfixed engagement with content.

Marclay’s masterpiece, The clock, will be on view at The Museum of Modern Art later this Fall.

Christian Marclay (b. 1955, San Rafael, California) has exhibited in museums and galleries internationally, including one-person presentations at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C. (1990); the Musée d’art et d’histoire, Geneva (1995); the Kunsthaus, Zurich (1997); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2001); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2002); Musée d’Art moderne et contemporain, Geneva (2008); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2010); Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2010); Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow (2011); the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2019) and the Centre Pompidou (2022–2023). A pioneering DJ using records and turntables as musical instruments to create sound collages, since 1979 Marclay has performed and recorded both solo and in collaboration with many musicians, including John Zorn, Elliott Sharp, Otomo Yoshihide, Butch Morris, Shelley Hirsch, Okkyung Lee, Mats Gustafsson, and Lee Ranaldo. His work is in the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; the Tate Modern, London; and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Marclay lives and works in London.