Jürgen Klauke

The artist Jürgen Klauke was born in 1943 in Kliding, near Cochem, Germany. He received his training from 1970 to 1974 under Alfred Will at Cologne’s art academy, the Hochschule für Kunst und Design. On the completion of his studies he was given a five-year teaching contract at the same school. Since 1970 he has drawn and annotated events and objects in his surroundings and staged seemingly banal, everyday situations in photographs. The central theme of his work, which consists of performances as well as pictures, is the human body and its sexual identity. He provocatively questions gender roles, and features his own body in his artistic work. Accordingly, Klauke is a representative of so-called Body Art. From 1994 to 2008 he taught as a professor of photography at the media arts school, the Kunsthochschule für Medien, in Cologne, where he lives and works.