Press Release

Camille Henrot will debut an extraordinary new body of bronze sculptures, titled ‘Abacus,’ for her first major exhibition with the gallery in New York City. Evoking children’s developmental tools, shoes, distorted graphs and ancient counting devices, the large-scale sculptures, alongside smaller-scaled works such as ‘Tomber Pour Toujours’ and ‘Misfits,’ address the friction between a nascent sense of imagination and society’s system of signs. The sculptures will be presented together with vibrant new paintings from the artist’s ‘Dos and Don’ts’ series.

International ongoing exhibitions

Camille Henrot, A Number of Things

Hauser & Wirth, New York (USA)

30.01 - 12.04.2025

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Initiated in 2021, the ‘Dos and Don’ts’ series combines printing, painting and collage techniques where etiquette books become the palimpsest for play with color, gesture, texture and trompe l’oeil. The artworks will emerge from a flooring intervention—conceived and designed with Charlap Hyman & Herrero—that transforms the gallery into a site of sensory experimentation. Henrot’s exhibition vivaciously sets the stage for the arbitrary nature of human behavior to circulate freely between rule and exception.

Henrot’s latest ‘Abacus’ sculptures unite the utilitarianism of the ancient calculating tool with the arches and spirals of a children’s bead maze—a toy popularized in the 1980s as a heuristic diversion in pediatric waiting rooms and nursery schools. Through these formal associations, an instinctive sense of play collides with the learned impulse to search out patterns and impose order. With their biomorphic contours, opaline patinas and quadruped or biped anatomies, these works seem charged with a lifeforce of their own. Hovering between pure abstraction and their multivalent referents, Henrot’s bronzes invite our unfettered, sensuous engagement, even as they allude to the symbolic systems that tyrannize our imaginations.

Behavioral conditioning is a central concern of Henrot’s ‘Dos and Don’ts’ series. These richly layered paintings consider the idea of ‘etiquette’ as it relates to society at large: its codes of conduct, laws and notions of authority, civility and conformity. The works feature collaged fragments of invoices from an embryology lab; a note conjugating the German verb ‘to be;’ dental X-rays; digital error messages; children’s school homework; and to-do lists, among other things. Together, they build on Henrot’s interest in making sense of the urge to organize and categorize information—a theme that has been prevalent in her practice since her groundbreaking film ‘Grosse Fatigue’ (2013). The ‘Dos and Don’ts’ series distorts its source material to reveal the constructed, performative nature of any social identity, while acknowledging the emotional security that behavioral mimicry and groupthink can provide.

Born in 1978 in Paris, France, the artist lives and works between Berlin and New York City. The practice of French artist Camille Henrot moves seamlessly between film, painting, drawing, bronze, sculpture, and installation. Henrot draws upon references from literature, psychoanalysis, social media, cultural anthropology, self-help, and the banality of everyday life in order to question what it means to be both a private individual and a global subject.

Exhibition 30 January - 12 April 2025. Hauser & Wirth, 22nd Street - New York 10011 (USA). T.: +1 21 27 90 39 00. Hours : Tuesday – Saturday, 10 am – 6 pm.

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