Camille Henrot at Hauser & Wirth NYC

Camille Henrot returns to New York City with “A Number of Things”, her first major solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth. Running from January 30 through April 12, 2025, the exhibition presents a collection of large-scale bronze sculptures, paintings, and installations. With her signature blend of intellectual rigor and playful experimentation, Henrot continues to explore the friction between structure and spontaneity, order, and imagination.

Born in Paris in 1978 and now based in New York, Camille Henrot has built an internationally recognized career that seamlessly blends film, sculpture, painting, and installation. Her breakthrough work, Grosse Fatigue (2013), a hypnotic meditation on knowledge and classification, earned her the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale. Since then, Henrot has exhibited at major institutions worldwide, including the Palais de Tokyo, the New Museum, and the National Gallery of Victoria.

Camille Henrot Challenges Order and Chaos

At the crux of “A Number of Things” are new additions to Henrot’s Abacus series (2024), which reimagine the ancient counting tool as a sculptural representation of the ways humans navigate rules, patterns, and systems. These large-scale bronze works fuse the rigid geometry of the abacus with the fluidity of childhood bead mazes, evoking the balance between disciplined learning and uninhibited creativity. These sculptures cloud the line between organic and mechanical, abstraction and representation.

Henrot’s fascination with human behavior extends into her Dos and Don’ts painting series, which combines printing, painting, and collage techniques to interrogate the influence of social norms. These works incorporate fragments of invoices, school assignments, error messages, and etiquette book excerpts, creating a chaotic yet meticulously arranged visual language.

A site-specific flooring intervention, designed in collaboration with Charlap Hyman & Herrero, adds another dimension to the exhibition, immersing visitors in Henrot’s world of calculated disorder. As they move through the space, they encounter steel wool and aluminum sculptures of dogs tethered to a pole—symbols of attachment, domestication, and dependency.

Henrot’s ability to translate complex philosophical ideas into visually compelling forms makes “A Number of Things” a focus exhibition. By merging historical references with contemporary anxieties, Camille Henrot invites you to reconsider the structures that define your lives—offering a space where the tension between order and chaos can be felt, questioned, and ultimately embraced.

Hauser & Wirth New York is hosting “A Number of Things” from January 30 through April 12, 2025.