NEW YORK, NY.- The Jewish Museum presents Marc Camille Chaimowicz: Your Place or Mine…, the London-based artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States. This large-scale survey presents Chaimowicz’s work in painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, installation, furniture, lighting, ceramics, textiles, and wallpaper made between 1978 and 2018, including never before exhibited pieces and three new commissions. The exhibition is on view March 16 through August 5, 2018.
Chaimowicz emerged in the early 1970s London art scene with the groundbreaking, performative installations Celebration? Real Life and Enough Tirrany (both 1972), that infused everyday life with art and politics, and that stood at the intersection of the gay liberation and feminist movements. In the years that followed, the artist moved his activities into his own home, the starting point for Your Place or Mine…. Associate Curator Kelly Taxter, organizer of the exhibition, notes that the “slyly provocative title positions the exhibition as a temporary connection between visitor and artist, who extends an invitation to enter his world.”
Chaimowicz was born in postwar Paris to a Polish Jewish father and French Catholic mother. The family moved to England when the artist was eight years old and soon settled in London, where he still lives and works. He returned to Paris in May 1968 to witness the student uprisings there, events that shaped his career. The interplay of two cultures, languages, and cities, as well as his rebelliousness enfolded in beauty, resonates across his life and work, and finds its place in this exhibition.
The Jewish Museum is housed in what was previously a family home. The Museum’s once-lived-in rooms, with their ornamental flourishes, offer the perfect setting for this artist, so preoccupied with the psychological, imaginative dimensions of domestic spaces, objects, and rituals. These act as source and subject of his work, which brings value to decoration, intimacy, and the interior life of the artist.
Chaimowicz’s artworks, beginning with the room filling installation Here and There… (1978), are arranged to evoke a series of spaces: a home, library, and park. In these places, private contemplation and sociability are commingled, and at odds, emphasizing the artist’s play with dualities. Chaimowicz always challenges divisions: between fine art and design, public and private, masculine and feminine, past and present. Likewise, he calls upon French, his first language, as readily as English, and the galleries are named L’entrée (the Entrance), Ici et La… (Here and There…), La Bibliothèque (the Library), Le Salon (the Salon), and Le Jardin Publique (the Public Garden).
Here and There…, the earliest work on view, reveals the centrality of interiors and the domestic. Then as now, Chaimowicz’s apartment plays the roles of home, studio, and gallery. This key work exemplifies his merger of fine art and decoration, and brings attention to his explorations of subjectivity.
La Bibliothèque focuses on Chaimowicz’s artist’s books, a form he has explored since the mid-1970s. The focal point of this gallery is The World of Interiors, a group of 80 collages that take their name from the British decor magazine World of Interiors. In 2006 it featured Chaimowicz and his home; in response, he composed a collage of each page of the issue which he then returned to book form. Chaimowicz’s World of Interiors reveals the many ways the artist plays with author’s voice, character, autobiography, and fiction. It might be considered an unorthodox guidebook to his practice.
Le Salon investigates the roles of guest and host in Chaimowicz’s work, the ways in which relationships factor into his narratives, imagery, and making. Rarely exhibited works on paper from the early 1990s are set against Vasque (2018), a newly commissioned wallpaper. North (1984-2018), a new carpet, is here exhibited for the first time.
Le Jardin Publique presents the full breadth of Chaimowicz’s output. On view are sculptures, ceramics, furniture, paintings, lighting, photographs, and textiles. These galleries privilege pleasure, imagination, and the viewer’s experience. The works are displayed on and around curvilinear platforms inspired by the pathways of Central Park, visible just outside the windows. Objects are arranged in vignettes meant to inspire visitors to meander as they would in a public park. Works in this section include Dual, a straight-backed chair that can be flipped upside down and backwards to become a lounge, and Desk on Decline, constructed so that one leg can be half-removed, allowing the desk to stand drastically tipped on one side. Both of these design-based sculptural objects are subtly fanciful, if not outright improbable.
The draperies in Chaimowicz’s Approach Road apartment, where Here and There… was created, inspired the new commission A New Curtain for KT (2018). The new curtains shade the windows and extend across the rear walls of the gallery, where they meet another new work end game (2018), a pair of mirrored doors that imply a passage to somewhere else. end game is an adaptation of cupboard doors in Chaimowicz’s current home, on the third floor of a 12-sided building in south London.
On view for the first time are 70 maquettes for possible and produced furniture, made between 1975 and 2018. These are displayed in l’Archive, a small niche specially constructed for this jewel-box presentation. Contrary to the impeccable finishes and luxurious materials of Chaimowicz’s fully realized works, these maquettes reveal the artist’s early musings on design, and its purposeful subversion.
Marc Camille Chaimowicz: Your Place or Mine… is organized by Kelly Taxter, Associate Curator, The Jewish Museum, in association with the Serpentine Galleries, London. The exhibition is designed by New Affiliates (Jaffer Kolb, Ivi Diamantopoulou).
