BY Paige K. Bradley in Profiles | 28 JAN 25

Camille Henrot’s Playful Acts of Disruption

From etiquette manuals to childhood memories, the artist’s new works at Hauser & Wirth explore the paradoxes of control and chaos

BY Paige K. Bradley in Profiles | 28 JAN 25

Camille Henrot works between painting, drawing, video, collage, ikebana and cast bronze, but to my mind her ultimate material is feeling. Scratching at the varnish we layer over human chaos – the ordering systems of social manners, calendar time, billing cycles, bureaucratic forms – she exposes the fluid, discomforting affects that arise from change, ambivalence and care. Taking influence from psychoanalytic theories related to early childhood development and the latent eroticism of child-rearing, Henrot builds environments that nurture a continuity of being.

Camille Henrot, Dos and Don'ts - All the Bridesmaids a Present, 2024. Acrylic, ink, collage and digital print on canvas, 136 x 166 x 4.5 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Hauser & Wirth, New York  ; photograph: Sarah Muehlbauer
Camille Henrot, Dos and Don’ts – All the Bridesmaids a Present, 2024, acrylic, ink, collage and digital print on canvas, 136 × 166 × 4.5 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Hauser & Wirth, New York; photograph: Sarah Muehlbauer

Her studio in Midtown Manhattan feels like a cocoon: an appropriate space from which such intricate and introspective work can emerge. A hallway decorated with exhibition posters and magazines leads to a space brimming with books, enough to teach an entire semester. In the kitchen, a collection of tea mugs shares space with a display of ceramic plates designed by Henrot herself. In the workspace, a wall showcases a set of very large Japanese or Korean brushes, hanging just beside a chartreuse and violet painting. Among several works Henrot keeps for herself, this one prominently features a striking trompe l’oeil depiction of a packet of birth control pills.

In her upcoming debut at Hauser & Wirth in New York, Henrot will show a new suite of paintings from her series ‘Dos and Don’ts’ (2021–ongoing), a formally playful but highly refined group of multi-layered, decoupaged pieces that take gleeful cues from a range of etiquette manuals salvaged by the artist while clearing things out of her mother’s house in France. Don’t: A Manual of Mistakes & Improprieties... (1880) and Savoir-Vivre in the 21st century (1991) are just two examples, the latter penned by the baroness Nadine de Rothschild. The cover of the former appears in Dos and Donts - (A Manual of Mistakes) (2024), conjugated by digitally printed family photos of the artist against an ombre background of lilac fading to tangerine.

Camille Henrot, Dos and Don'ts - Without Causing Offense 2024 Acrylic, ink, collage and digital print on canvas 185 x 152 x 4.5 cm / 72 7/8 x 59 7/8 x 1 3/4 in Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer
Camille Henrot, Dos and Don’ts - Without Causing Offense, 2024, acrylic, ink, collage and digital print on canvas, 185 × 152 × 4.5 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Hauser & Wirth, New York; photograph: Sarah Muehlbauer

Henrot’s mother was herself an artist, working as a bird taxidermist for the Natural History Museum of Paris. ‘When I was young, I was only interested in drawing. Everybody thought “She’s an artist!”’ Henrot says. ‘But I wanted people to want to work with me - my mother was working alone. That didn’t appear to me as very practical.’ In Milkyways (2023), Henrot’s essay collection addressing motherhood and its convergence with artistic work, she describes how her mother kept a room in the family apartment filled with taxidermy materials, a room that the young Henrot was forbidden to enter – until, of course, she did, upsetting a drawer full of fake eyes and sending them rolling across the floor.

The roots of Henrot’s exuberant, sensual, and at times erotic approach to imagery and form lie in her training in animation at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, where she was drawn to enrol for its institutional focus on culture – conceived broadly – rather than on niche debates in art history. Disillusioned by her subsequent experiences in the cartoonishly sexist French animation and advertising industries – colleagues dubbed her work computer ‘MY ASS’ in a setup for regular punchlines – it was only after her early experimental films, originally made for popular music concerts, drew the attention of an editor and critic at Beaux-Arts magazine, that she was offered her first show.

Camille Henrot, Dos and Don'ts - Don't (A Manual of Mistakes) 2024 Acrylic, ink, collage, 3D printed elements and digital print on canvas 136 x 166 x 4.5 cm / 53 1/2 x 65 3/8 x 1 3/4 in Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer
Camille Henrot, Dos and Don’ts - Don't (A Manual of Mistakes), 2024, acrylic, ink, collage, 3D printed elements and digital print on canvas, featuring images of Maria Fonti and Mauro Hertig, 136 ×166 × 4.5 cm.  Courtesy: the artist and Hauser & Wirth, New York; photograph: Sarah Muehlbauer

The exhibition at Hauser & Wirth will also include bronze and rubber sculptures from a new series titled ‘Abacus’ (2024–ongoing), that twist the conventional form of the counting apparatus into surrealist, suggestively feminine markers of time. One towering, effervescently patinated abacus that recalls the bestial forms of Louise Bourgeois will have its base sunk into the exhibition’s main installation scheme, which was designed in collaboration with the New York-based firm Charlap Hyman & Herrero: a turquoise rubber flooring of the kind used to build out playgrounds, implicitly modifying the gallery from a blank space to a purposeful room.

The flooring functions similarly to what psychoanalyst and paediatrician Donald Woods Winnicott termed the holding environment’ in his book Holding and Interpretation: Fragment of an Analysis (1986): a calming haptic surround in which the attentive care – and physical touch – of the mother supports an infants healthy development, to put it briefly. Winnicott’s ideas have been a perennial inspiration to artists, and his is a generous and useful framework since it allows for an understanding of artworks installed together as metaphors for bodily, interpersonal relationships.

Camille Henrot, 1263 / 3612 (Abacus) 2024 Bronze, resin, rubber 251 x 79.6 x 392.2 cm / 98 7/8 x 31 3/8 x 154 3/8 in Photo: Stefan Altenburger
Camille Henrot, 1263 / 3612 (Abacus), 2024, bronze, resin, rubber, 251 × 79.6 × 392.2 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Hauser & Wirth, New York; photograph: Stefan Altenburger

Henrot’s art calls for an encounter with being: how we could be; how we might desire to be; what prevents us from being; what we feel might annihilate us. From the major moods to minor feelings, she offers all shades of affect, as multifarious as the riotous colours of her digital and acrylic palettes. In her 2017 exhibition ‘Days Are Dogs’ at the Palais de Tokyo, an ultramarine hue elided the perceptual difference between wall-to-wall carpeting and the walls themselves. A survey show in 2023, ‘Sweet Days of Discipline’ at the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, featured a leashed gaggle of sculpted canines lingering in a room of lavender and Kelly green-filtered natural light. Those dogs reappear in this new exhibition as well, with charming names like Noé or Richelieu, the latter sporting a steel wool coat and the uncannily crafted mien of an Irish wolfhound.

Henrot’s artistic concern with the practice of ambivalence as an experiential form dovetails with the earlier psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s clinical and theoretical focus on the state, which along with vulnerability, constitutes the core of Henrot’s work. The meticulous expressiveness of her rigorously planned and carefully wrought installations has less to do with deploying the gimmick of the ‘immersive experience’ – which often sets hard limits on a viewer’s perceptions and even mobility – and more to do with prompting the viewer into awareness of their own agency and capacity to see and make meaning: ‘If you accumulate a lot of things and allow a bit of messiness and disorder [into the work] then this keep[s] the door open for things to happen to [the viewer].’

Camille Henrot, 73 / 37 (Abacus) 2024 Bronze, resin, rubber 210 x 272 x 100 cm / 82 5/8 x 107 1/8 x 39 3/8 in Photo: Nicolas Brasseur
Camille Henrot, 73 / 37 (Abacus), 2024, bronze, resin, rubber, 2.1 × 2.7 × 1 m. Courtesy: the artist and Hauser & Wirth, New York; photograph: Nicolas Brasseur

As the artist wrote in the essay ‘Sexuality’, published in Milkyways, ‘a baby sees bodies (its mother’s body) not as part of a complete, bigger system that belongs to an individual, but rather as a sort of cartoonish bricolage of disparate elements, like toys in a playground.’ What can the child do, or be, within these parameters? What can an adult audience bring forth in themselves through a similar spirit of play? Where do we rest and where do we come to life? The questions have priority over the answers.

Camille Henrot: A Number of Things’ is on view at Hauser & Wirth, New York, from 30 January to 12 April.

Main image: Camille Henrot, Tomber pour toujours2023, bronze, 20 × 92 × 90 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Hauser & Wirth, New York; photograph: Nicolas Brasseur

Paige K. Bradley is an artist and writer from Los Angeles, USA. 

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