Michael Clegg and Martin Guttmann live and work in New York and Vienna. Their work explores the public’s interaction with their pieces, and how this transforms traditionally formal institutions such as art galleries and libraries.
People are invited to make use of their works, touch them, move them, strap themselves to them or, in the case of their interactive sculpture Continuous Drawing/ Exquisite Corpse (2006), featured in Peckham Platform’s exhibition Commission 6 in 2010, draw on them. The sculpture is a wooden pentagonal column, painted as a blackboard, with five horizontally revolving layers. Up to five people, each standing in front of one of the faces, can use chalk to draw a human figure which, as the layers are turned, exchange sections of their anatomies, assuming different forms and identities. This turns the exercise into a version of the Surrealist game “The Exquisite Corpse”.
Their work was also part of the 2016 Peckham Platform Retrospective exhibition, a timeline of all 20 artists commissions realised by Peckham Platform between 2010 – 2016.
Clegg & Guttmann has exhibited in Germany, Holland, Austria, France, America and the UK.
