Evoking youngsters’s developmental instruments, footwear, distorted graphs and counting units, new large-scale bronze sculptures from the artist’s “Abacus” sequence (2024)—introduced alongside latest smaller- scaled works—deal with the friction between a nascent sense of creativeness and society’s methods of indicators. The exhibition may even characteristic vibrant new work from Henrot’s ongoing “Dos and Don’ts” sequence. Initiated in 2021, this sequence combines printing, portray and collage strategies with excerpts from etiquette books and laptop desktop screenshots to function palimpsests for play with shade, gesture, texture and trompe l’oeil. The artworks on view will emerge from a site-specific flooring intervention conceived and designed by Henrot in collaboration with Charlap Hyman & Herrero. “A Variety of Issues” vivaciously units the stage for the arbitrary nature of human habits to flow into freely between rule and exception.
As viewers enter the gallery, they are going to be greeted by a pack of canine sculptures tied to a pole, as if left unattended by their walker. Formed from metal wool, aluminum sheets, carved wooden, wax, chain and different sudden supplies, Henrot’s creatures converse to the ever-unfolding results of human design and domestication. As an extension of Henrot’s ongoing curiosity in relationships of dependency, the canine stand in as the last word picture of attachment.
Just a few steps away, Henrot’s newest “Abacus” sculptures unite the utilitarianism of the traditional calculating instrument with the arches and spirals of a youngsters’s bead maze—a toy popularized within the Eighties as a heuristic diversion in pediatric ready rooms and nursery colleges. By these formal associations, an instinctive sense of play collides with the discovered impulse to go looking out patterns and impose order. The hovering strains of “347 / 743 (Abacus)” (2023–24) seem blown off their heart, as if the towering determine is bending to the circumstances of its atmosphere. The stacked rubber beads and subtly shoe-like type of “1263 / 3612 (Abacus)” (2023–24) recommend a compulsion for step counting amidst the relentless pursuit of self-optimization. In the meantime, the waves and ridges of “73 / 37 (Abacus)” (2023–24) recall the infinitely cyclical nature of human improvement and studying. With their biomorphic contours, opaline patinas and quadruped or biped anatomies, these works appear charged with a lifeforce of their very own. Hovering between pure abstraction and their multivalent referents, Henrot’s bronzes invite our unfettered, sensuous engagement, whilst they allude to the symbolic methods that tyrannize our imaginations.
Behavioral conditioning is a central concern of Henrot’s “Dos and Don’ts” sequence. These richly layered work think about the thought of “etiquette” because it pertains to society at giant: its codes of conduct, legal guidelines and notions of authority, civility and conformity. The works characteristic collaged fragments of invoices from an embryology lab; a notice conjugating the German verb ‘to be;’ dental X-rays; digital error messages; youngsters’s faculty homework; and to- do lists, amongst different issues. Collectively, they construct on Henrot’s curiosity in making sense of the urge to arrange and categorize data—a theme that has been prevalent in her observe since her groundbreaking movie ‘Grosse Fatigue’ (2013). The ‘Dos and Don’ts’ sequence distorts its supply materials to disclose the constructed, performative nature of any social id, whereas acknowledging the emotional safety that behavioral mimicry and groupthink can present.
Because the exhibition’s nearly childlike title suggests, “A Variety of Issues” brings collectively a disparate however associated group of works that collectively deal with the enormously troublesome process that’s dwelling, studying and rising in society. With tenderness for essentially the most banal traces of our existences, Henrot affords a meditation on the competing impulses to each combine and resist the unquestioned buildings of society in our on a regular basis lives.
at Hauser & Wirth, New York
till April 12, 2025
