New York
Spread across a rigidly gridded floor, Camille Henrot’s “A Number of Things” (on view through April 12, 2025) suggests an immersive VR experience. But instead of computer projections and programs, the demarcated space contains handmade and cast bronze sculptures that insist on their material presence. Even if the perspectival ordering of the grid (a collaboration with the architectural firm Charlap Hyman & Herrero) points to rules and rationality, the seemingly random scattering of the works defies regulation, encouraging us to wander freely from piece to piece, giving precedence to imagination and play.
Henrot’s exploration of behavior, particularly discipline and control, is introduced at the entrance to the gallery, where several sculpted dogs are gathered, their leashes tied to a post. Fashioned from carved wood, cast steel or concrete, fiberglass, and steel wool, they amply display Henrot’s facility with materials and abstracted form, as well as her love of dogs, with each breed and personality succinctly and often humorously captured through pose and placement. As one walks through or around the pack without fear of biting or barking, the dogs wait patiently, their trained and leash-bound bodies perfectly capturing Henrot’s concern with domestication and dependency.
Several sculptures from the on-going “Abacus” series further populate the grid. Unlike the dogs, which are recognizable and to scale, these larger, more abstract works, fabricated in cast bronze and painted with a soft opaline pastel patina, suggest surreal biomorphic forms, sometimes static, sometimes bending or stretching. Each one interacts with a column or surrounding arch festooned with polyurethane red beads that can be moved up and down, recalling a children’s toy, as well as the ancient calculating tool. While the beads assert counting and structure, the undulating, curving forms remain more fluid, inviting the pleasure of sight and touch.
Bridging the monumental and the familiar, the bent form of 73/37 (Abacus) calls to mind a yoga pose; the overarching beaded hoop seems to tilt in response. The towering 19-foot-tall 347 /743 (Abacus) resembles a giraffe or playground jungle gym, its upper parts leaning almost precariously as if responding to the wind, which renders its red beads a potentially unreliable counting device. 1263/3612 (Abacus) combines poles with stacked beads and fanciful shoe-like shapes that step outside the grid.
While these works inspire free association and advocate for the importance of the imagination—implying that the grid’s rubric of rules and orderliness can be disrupted—other sculptures inquire into the nature of art-making and the desire to break completely free of formal boundaries. Like a test of ability or behavioral development, the bronze box of Misfits (2023) waits to see if a circle, triangle, and square (the building blocks of composition) will be placed in the correct holes. The abstracted key shapes held by a ring in Tomber pour toujours (2023) similarly blur the line between convention and imagination; they could open doors, or they could summon chance.
Several wall reliefs (which Henrot calls paintings), made up of collaged elements including digital images, graphs, charts, excerpts from etiquette books, psychology manuals, dental x-rays, children’s homework, to-do lists, and computer screenshots, continue her engagement with the effects of design, dependency, domestication, and behavioral conditioning. Visually and conceptually, however, they are less engaging than the sculptures. Whether obedient dogs or free-flowing forms, Henrot’s ingenuity and playful interaction bring an immediacy to her meditations on the challenges of socialization that is both charming and thought-provoking.
