Claudia Comte's "autobiography" (artist's book).
Claudia Comte explains her autobiography by photographing the environment of her Swiss studio—a solid ecosystem of plants, animals, sculptures and people. Each photo was taken during the timeframe of 2020 to 2022 with her iPhone, through the days and the seasons.
Autobiography is a series published by Tonini Editore. Each volume is dedicated to an artist, who is free to carry out the topic of the autobiography by means of text or visual supports. Belonging to a series, each book has the same size and maximum amount of pages (64). The selection of the artists participating to the series is coordinated by a scientific committee made up of six renown personalities in the world of the art research and collection: Pedro Barbosa (collector and founder of the Coleção Moraes - Barbosa), Alex Bacon (art historian), Claudio Guenzani (gallery owner in Milan, owner of the Studio Guenzani),
Michele Lombardelli (artist, composer, typographer and consultant for several publishing houses), Shwetal Ashvin Patel (writer and researcher, founding member of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale), Christoph Schifferli (collector and scholar), and Valentino Tonini (director of the homonymous publishing house).
Claudia Comte (born 1983 in Grancy, Switzerland) is an artist based in the countryside outside of Basel, Switzerland. She works between media, often combining sculptures or installation with wall paintings to create environments where works relate to each other with a visual rhythm that is both methodical and playful. Her work is defined by her interest in the memory of materials and by a careful observation of how the hand relates to different technologies. Claudia Comte has been invested in understanding the relationships between different forms of life. Materials do not only have a memory, but they also possess a knowledge about the environments they belong to. Marble entails the ocean, and life under water is crystallized and it would be inaccurate to see this material as hard, since it is liquid at its core. Wood "remembers" the climate conditions of the planet and the forest that embodies the thousands of symbiotic processes that allow air, energy, breathing, growing, food, shelter. Claudia Comte's work opens our view to environment, oxygen, the way the conditions of our planet modify the materials—in every pattern and object.
Comte was awarded the Swiss Art Award in 2014 and with the Kiefer Hablitzel Award in 2012. She got supported by the UBS Foundation for Contemporary Art (Switzerland) in 2012 and won the Kulturförderpreis by Alexander Clavel Stiftung (Riehen, Switzerland) in 2018.
