We leave for Chelsea for an afternoon heading to the gallery and find ourselves fascinated by the floor. However, Kamille Henrott, a French-born multimedia artist based in New York, invites Hauser & Wirth to turn down. Instead of the usual spread of poured and polished grey concrete, Henrott devised a wall-to-wall green rubber surface that was overpainted with fragmentary lines of modernist grids. She may be the first artist in history to aim to infuse the huge gallery chastity space with an accident-filled look in the toddler playroom.
On the other side of the gallery's entrance, visitors encounter a small sculpture of a dog, each with a store-bought leash, connected to a central pole. It's as if the dog pedestrian stopped by to watch the show and then disappeared, the puppy was left unattended and the water was gone. Do you know that it is illegal for dog Walker to tie or link dogs in public for more than three hours in New York City? The problem lies at the heart of Henrott's highly appealing exhibit, “Many Things.” It analyzes the practices of care (whether for children or pets) and the emotions they generate, from seductive attachment to pain needs.
That said, Henrott's work is touchingly free from didacticism and pays attention to the differences between individual dogs. “Francesco” is a French bulldog roughly carved from a block of wood, as entitled “one sculpture.” “Margaret” is an icon of the junk int art crowd tradition – rolled up together from a balanced, crumpled brown gym bag on top of four steel strips of feet. The Dachshund “Sammy” is derived from Picasso's open sheet metal sculpture. The “Richelieu,” an Afghan hound covered in hanging masses of steel wool, may be the descendant of the “dog” of Giacometti's skin and bones.
And don't miss out on “Herbert,” the most angular and abstract, which essentially looks like a Bauhaus building on a rope. The saddest and cutest one is certainly the “helix”. A copper puppy with almond-shaped eyes, pointy ears, and a body that resembles a sweet potato. Her hind legs aren't enough, so she rides a pair of wheels from a prosthetic stroller.
To ask a dull question: are these sculptures or are you pulling toys for a 4 year old? Henrott's sculpture is a hybrid object that skillfully combines the cliches of 20th century art, particularly the winding bean shapes of Surrealism, and is a form borrowed from the mass-produced world of child play. She wants to convey a small, vulnerable, undistinguished feeling that a large dog of modernism refuses to acknowledge in her quest for aesthetic purity and grand effect. She can be seen as the direct heir of Louise Bourgeois. Louise Bourgeois was born in France and was psychologically leaning, but Henrott is more amusing and ironic through the attic of sculpture history.
Henrott, now 46 years old, has been living in New York since 2011. Her show at Hauser & Worth came to mind when she received the February issue of the Atlantic, accompanied by her first ad at the gallery. There, on the back cover is a full-page photo of Henrot, who works in a metal foundry. Slim with flaxseed hair, she wears a coverall. She holds a torch and quietly aims a jet of blue bird flames on the surface of a giant sculpture of a bronze. You can only see part of the sculpture, but there is a wavy monument about it, just like a large wave lying around.
Henrot can be called the star of the international art circuit, but as a multimedia artist, its ambiguous hyphenate is Signature style. She first achieved fame with “Gloss Fatigue,” a 13-minute color video that relates the story of Earth's creation with rhythmic, wrapped beats. (The voices were appealing, “In the beginning… there was no beginning,” and you can watch it on YouTube.) It was first exhibited at the 2013 Venice Biennale. In addition to films and videos, she can claim the incredible and buoyant output of drawings. In 2023, she published a large selection of personal essays on “Milkies” about motherhood.
The center of the current show belongs to her Abacus series. All the large bronze sculptures, all from 2024, are decorated with amber coloured beads that can be actually touched and slid along the rod, with titles after ancient counting devices. “73/37 (Abacus)” – The sculpture title, which is partially visible in magazine ads, does not disappoint anyone. It is a bronze wavy upward angled chunk with enormously enlarged fly eyes, a wavy upward angled bronze chunk adorned with aerial hoops of acrobatics. As an art student in Paris, Henrott studied film animation. This may explain why her sculpture suggests movement against the law of gravity.
In contrast, “347/743 (Abacus)” is based on a classic “bead maze” toy that challenges preschool children to slide wooden beads over tangles of painted wires It is an object that openly loops at the height of the sky. The 17-foot-high version of Henrot requires searching. And then upload. It is proof-based abstract, but it is impressively appealing and brings out a satisfying set of associations. As I walked around it, I spied on various hints of Calder-style circus giraffes. Tall re waving in the breeze. And two Wiley women, one hovering protectively over the other.
The third large bronze “1263/3612 (Abacus)” is more dalli-esque and cartoonish, with limbs long hanging from the torso and body locations. 8 feet tall, Its rod-length metal slope suggests a right-angle triangle or playground slide. Its surface dyes rainbow pink girly patina, turning stacks of abacus beads into bangle bracelets.
The show at Hauser & Wirth also includes ten works known as paintings. In fact, they are digital collages enhanced with brush strokes that perform the gamut, from free-throwed traces of pigments to computer-generated marks. They belong to Henrot's recent series called “Dos and Dots.” The title comes from a stack of old-fashioned etiquette manuals she found at her mother's house.
Some of the paintings simulate the appearance of a desktop screen with seven tabs open simultaneously. To suit current autofiction preferences, she has such personal materials (often scanned) such as photos of two children, black and white dental x-ray strips, and bill photos from egg storage companies. (expansion) is incorporated. And an engraved envelope from who is who in France. You may feel sympathy when you see the painted paper painted with a series of codes that signal a computer malfunction.
Her paintings are sometimes rough and struggling, and generally appear pale next to the sculpture. They look familiar. It is a digital gloss of pop art's long-established innovation. Her oversized collage elements reverts to James Rosenquist's early paintings. Her frequent single oversized floating brush strokes (a kind of frozen bacon slice made with the help of an app called Procreate) keeps in mind Laura Owens, Leulichtenstein and other top non-causalists And it has accepted the traditional top of its unstable possibilities and the cliches of commercial printing.
Still, she leaves this show excited by her sculpture. There is much written about the challenges that working mothers face in both fiction and non-fiction, but imagine trying to make sculptures on that infinitely complex subject.
Henrott does her emotionally resonating sculpture, “La Pause.” It consists of heavy work gloves cast in bronze and displayed on the floor without a pedestal. It's as if the artist needed a break, took off his gloves, threw them down into a random spot on the floor and ran through the door. Where has she gone and when will she come back? “La Pause” gives the sense of the weight of a mother's absence and the anxiety experienced by a considerable part of juniors around the world.
Camille Henrot: A lot of things
Until April 12th, Hauser & Worth, 542 West 22nd Street, Manhattan. 212 790 3900, hauserwirth.com.
