It isn’t usually that these of us setting out in Chelsea for a day of gallery-going discover ourselves mesmerized by a flooring. However Camille Henrot, a French-born, New York-based multimedia artist, entices you to gaze downward at Hauser & Wirth. Within the place of the same old expanse of poured and polished grey concrete, Henrot has devised a floor of wall-to-wall inexperienced rubber overpainted with the crisscrossing strains of a modernist grid. She could be the primary artist in historical past to aspire to imbue the chaste house of a mega-gallery with the accident-proof look of a toddler’s play room.
Reverse the doorway to the gallery, a customer encounters 10 smallish sculptures of canine, every on a store-bought leash and tethered to a central pole. It’s as if a canine walker stopped by to see the present after which disappeared, leaving the pups unattended and with out water. Does the canine walker know that it occurs to be unlawful in New York Metropolis to tie or chain a canine in a public house for longer than three hours? The query goes to the guts of Henrot’s vastly participating exhibition, “A Variety of Issues,” a considerable gathering of sculptures and work that analyze the conventions of care (be it for kids or pets) and the feelings they generate, from enraptured attachment to aching want.
That mentioned, Henrot’s work is impressively freed from didacticism and attentive to the variations amongst particular person canine. “Francesco,” as one sculpture is titled, is a French bulldog roughly carved from a block of wooden. “Margaret” — an icon of the junk-into-art custom of assemblage — has been cobbled collectively from a crumpled brown gymnasium bag balanced atop 4 metal strips for legs. “Sammy,” a dachshund, is descended from Picasso’s open sheet-metal sculptures. “Richelieu,” an Afghan hound lined in hanging clumps of metal wool, could possibly be the offspring of Giacometti’s skin-and-bones “Canine.”
And don’t miss “Herbert,” probably the most angular and summary, who mainly seems like a Bauhaus constructing on a leash. The saddest and cutest is definitely “Hélix,” a coppery pup with almond-shaped eyes, pointy ears and a physique that resembles a candy potato. Lacking her hind legs, she will get round on a pair of prosthetic stroller wheels.
To ask a blunt query: Are these sculptures, or are they pull toys for 4-year-olds? Henrot’s sculptures are hybrid objects that cleverly mix the clichés of twentieth century artwork, particularly Surrealism’s curving bean shapes, with varieties borrowed from the mass-produced world of youngsters’s playthings. She needs to convey the small, weak, unheroic emotions that the large canine of modernism refused to acknowledge of their quest for aesthetic purity and grand results. You’ll be able to see her as a direct inheritor of Louise Bourgeois, who was additionally French-born and psychologically inclined, though Henrot is extra amused and ironic in her rambles by way of the attic of sculptural historical past.
Now 46, Henrot has lived in New York since 2011. Her present at Hauser & Wirth is her first at that gallery and accompanied by a big stage of promoting, of which I turned conscious once I acquired my February difficulty of The Atlantic. There, on the again cowl, is a full-page {photograph} of Henrot at work in a steel foundry. Slender, with flaxen hair, she is carrying coveralls and what seem like a pair of thick leather-based work gloves. She holds a torch and calmly goals a jet of blue-violet flame on the floor of a large bronze sculpture, presumably to deepen its coloration within the course of generally known as patination. Though you see solely a part of the sculpture, it has an undulant monumentality about it, like a fantastic wave rolling in.
Henrot can pretty be known as a star on the worldwide artwork circuit, though as a multimedia artist, that nebulous hyphenate, she lacks a signature type. She earned her first renown for “Grosse Fatigue,” a 13-minute coloration video that relates the story of the earth’s creation in rhythmic, rapping beats. (“At first … there was no starting,” a voice intones catchily. You’ll be able to watch a section on YouTube.) It was first proven on the 2013 Venice Biennale, the place Henrot received a Silver Lion award for many promising new artist. Along with movies and movies, she will declare a prodigious and buoyant output of drawings. In 2023, she revealed a quantity of non-public essays about motherhood, “Milkyways.”
The guts of the present present belongs to her Abacus collection — three large-scale bronze sculptures, all from 2024, titled after the traditional counting machine and embellished with amber-colored beads that you may truly contact and slide alongside rods. “73/37 (Abacus)” — the title of the sculpture partly seen within the journal commercial — doesn’t disappoint in particular person. It’s a imaginative and prescient of fluid feminine energy, a wavy, upwardly angled chunk of bronze outfitted with a pair of magnified fly eyes and topped by an acrobat’s aerial hoop. As an artwork pupil in Paris, Henrot studied movie animation, which can clarify why her sculptures disobey the legal guidelines of gravity and counsel movement.
“347/743 (Abacus),” against this, is a sky-high, brazenly looping object based mostly on the traditional “bead maze” toy that challenges preschool kids to slip wood beads throughout a tangle of painted wires. Henrot’s 17-foot-tall model requires that you just search for. And up. Though it’s certifiably summary, it’s impressively allusive and units off a gratifying chain of associations. As I walked round it, I variously espied intimations of a Calder-style circus giraffe; tall reeds waving in a breeze; and two wiry girls, one hovering protectively over the opposite.
A 3rd large-scale bronze, “1263/3612 (Abacus)” is extra Dali-esque and cartoony, with lengthy, dangling limbs within the place of a torso or a physique. Standing eight toes tall, its rodlike lengths of steel slope although house, suggesting a right-angle triangle or a playground slide. Its floor shimmers with a girlie patina of iridescent pink and turns stacks of abacus beads into bangle bracelets.
The present at Hauser & Wirth additionally consists of 10 works described as work, which presumes an elastic definition of what a portray is. They’re truly digital collages enhanced with brushstrokes that run the gamut from freely tossed traceries of pigment to computer-generated marks. They belong to Henrot’s latest collection known as “Dos and Don’ts,” whose title comes from a stack of old school etiquette manuals she present in her mom’s home.
A number of the work simulate the look of a desktop display with seven tabs open on the identical time. Consistent with the present style for autofiction, she weaves in such private materials (usually scanned and enlarged) as images of her two kids, a strip of black-and-white dental X-rays, a invoice from an egg-storage firm, and a stamped envelope from Who’s Who in France. You could really feel sympathetic while you see a portray papered over with a string of code signaling a pc malfunction.
Her work at instances look schematic and labored, and normally pale beside the sculptures. They appear acquainted, a digital gloss on the long-established improvements of Pop artwork. Her concatenations of outsized collage parts hark again to the early work of James Rosenquist. Her frequent use of an oversize, floating, hand-painted brushstroke — a form of frozen-looking bacon slice accomplished with the assistance of an app known as Procreate — places you in thoughts of Laura Owens, Roy Lichtenstein and different high non-expressionists who’ve emptied the standard brushstroke of its angsty prospects and embraced the clichés of economic printing.
Nonetheless, one comes away from this present excited by her sculptures. A lot has been written, in each fiction and nonfiction, concerning the challenges confronted by working moms, however think about attempting to make a sculpture on that infinitely advanced topic.
Henrot does simply that in her emotionally resonant sculpture, “La Pause.” It consists of a pair of heavy work gloves, forged in bronze and displayed on the ground, with out a pedestal. It’s as if the artist, in want of a break, took off her gloves, threw them down in a random spot on the ground, and ran out the door. The place did she go and when is she coming again? “La Pause” makes you’re feeling the burden of a mom’s absence, in addition to the nervousness skilled by the substantial a part of the world’s junior inhabitants that’s endlessly screaming, “Mother, the place are you?”
Camille Henrot: A Variety of Issues
By April 12, Hauser & Wirth, 542 West twenty second Avenue, Manhattan; 212 790 3900, HauserWirth.com.
