Christian Marclay, The Clock

The National Gallery of Iceland is pleased to host the Icelandic premiere of the renowned Swiss American artist Christian Marclay’s masterwork, The Clock, 2010, an epic, 24-hour single channel video with sound. Winner of the Golden Lion Award at the 2011 Venice Biennale and widely acclaimed as one of the most significant works of art of the 21st century, The Clock is both a profound meditation about time and an homage to the history of cinema. 

Marclay’s video is structured as a montage of thousands of film clips, in black and white and in color, collected over the course of three years. Each clip references a moment in time, whether in dialogue or as indexed to a timepiece – a clock, watch, hourglass, sundial, or blinking LED alarm clock – covering in chronological sequence the entire span of a day, minute by minute. Synchronized to the local time, the video is itself a timepiece. The Clock is also a soundscape composed by Marclay, using the rhythms of sound and music to track the passage of time.

No single narrative emerges from the myriad moments in time that are spliced together in The Clock. Instead, an almost surreal effect emerges when observing the events that unfold over the course of a day. In one sense, The Clock is an epic narrative of human activity as told through the prism of cinema, the shared routines of daily existence inevitably leading to dramas of chance encounters and unexpected events.

The Clock is also a memento mori, a reminder of the temporality of life. Marclay has said that it is “very much about death in a way… The narrative gets interrupted constantly and you’re constantly reminded of what time it is.”   

There will be two 24-hour showings of The Clock: one on the opening night of the exhibition on May 2nd from 5 pm to May3rd at 5pm, and a second on the summer solstice, June 21st. The museum will be open non stop from 10 am on June 21 until 5 pm on June 22nd.

About the artist

CHRISTIAN MARCLAY For nearly 40 years, Christian Marclay (b. 1955, San Rafael, CA) has been exploring the connections between vision and sound, creating works in which these two sensibilities enrich and challenge one another. Marclay garnered international acclaim at the 54th Venice Biennale for his masterpiece video work, The Clock, for which he received the prestigious Golden Lion award. Marclay’s work has been 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); Muséed’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); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2022–2023); and the Museum of Modern Art (2024–2025). 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

 The exhibition has been funded in part by Pro Helvetia.