Born in Post-war Paris and educated in England, Marc Camille Chaimowicz inhabited a singular position at the crossroads of two art-scenes, cultures and languages. Like the artist himself, his refined yet playful work defies easy categorisation, demanding attention to detail while remaining generous and infused with beauty. Resisting claims for art’s autonomy, Chaimowicz embraces the decorative arts. In a body of work spanning 50 years, Chaimowicz has intertwined design, painting, print-making, collage and his daily life into a highly personal vocabulary. His work continues to be of great importance and influence to younger artists, not only for his constant yet subtle challenging of the role of art, but his development of a queer aesthetic.
Chaimowicz exhibited internationally throughout his career and recently, in 2024, Le Consortium, Dijon, France presented his solo show A Gift, with Love….. Past solo exhibitions include: Nuit américaine, WIELS, Brussels, BE, 2023; Zig Zag and Many Ribbons…, MAMC+, Saint-Étienne, France, 2022; Dear Valérie..., Kunsthalle Bern, CH, 2020; Your Place or Mine…, Jewish Museum, New York, NY, 2018; An Autumn Lexicon, The Serpentine, London, UK, 2016; Maybe Metafisica, Triennale di Milano, Milano, IT, 2016; Jean Genet... The Courtesy of Objects, Act 1 & Act 2, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK, 2011, among others. In 2009, he inaugurated the new Artist Space in New York with the solo installation Enough Tiranny Recalled, 1972 – 2009, and in 2008 his work was included in the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art.
Chaimowicz's work is included in the permanent collections of Consortium Museum, Dijon, FR; FRAC Bourgogne, Dijon, FR; MoMA, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; Tate Modern, London, UK; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK; The Jewish Museum, New York, NY; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, among others.
Born in Paris in 1946, The London-based French artist has been showcased twice at the Consortium Museum—where many of his performances took place—on the occasion of two monographic exhibitions, in 1984 and 1994.
Since the early 1970s, Chaimowicz’s work has displayed eclectic influences, including French modern literature (Gide, Cocteau, Genet, Proust), English pop art (Richard Hamilton), and glam rock.
During the era of minimal art, he merged performance art and installation art, as exemplified with what remains to this day his most famous piece, Celebration? Realife (1972). This work led him to host visitors for tea—embracing the demanding art of conversation—in the gallery where he had decided to live during the exhibition.
Marc Camille Chaimowicz is an understated pioneer, who has steadfastly sailed against the prevailing artistic winds since the start of his career in London in the 1970s. Folding together past and present, Chaimowicz’s exhibition at WIELS brings together three work groups, all examining intimacy, domesticity, and the desire to create one own’s context.
The MAMC+ gave carte blanche to Marc Camille Chaimowicz for his first exhibition in France of such an importance.
Starting from the Museum – its building, the industrial history of its area and its collections where art and design both found their place – the artist has conceived a conversation between more than eighty pieces he realized from the 1960s onwards and thirty works or so from the Museum’s collection. Chaimowicz unfolds those mixed artefacts within discreet dramas, between environments and interior designs, as sequences of a tailored screenplay: Zig Zag, Rachel et Graham, L’entrepôt, Peintures 1, Peintures 2, Du Textile, ...Many Ribbons.
Following the Nazi occupation of France in 1940, communists, Jews and members of the Resistance sought refuge at a local chateau run by the American journalist Varian Fry. In the middle of the war, Villa Air-Bel had been the temporary home of some of the 20th century’s most prominent artists and thinkers, including Wifredo Lam, Jacqueline Lamba, Victor Serge, Anna Seghers, Max Ernst, André Breton and Marcel Duchamp, among many others. For a short time, it was a safe haven where political dissidents, united in uncertainty, suspended in time, engaged in playful artistic experiments to cope with their bleak realities, while they awaited the arrival of documents that would let them escape to the Americas. Today, little remains of this wartime sanctuary, no monuments, no reminders.
The art of Marc Camille Chaimowicz is rich in nuances. It oscillates in the specific, but at the same time appears abstract and, indeed, other-worldly. Emotional, yet cool. Intimate, yet foreign. His art is cheerful and melancholic. Tasteful, at times almost artificial, but simple.
Even the boundaries between public and private space present themselves as soft shades. But his art is not autobiographic or authentic. The way we furnish our living environments, the way spaces are decorated remains, to some extent, a construction and metaphor. Just as the things we wear on our bodies, our personal furnishings can provide stability. At the same time, however, they are invariably stage and costume in the script of life.
Chaimowicz does not limit himself to the realms of the private: reference to public life is made on a continuous basis. Actions and objects pass into public space or open up to many as serial products.
His exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bern includes works from the 1970s to the present. It focuses on rarely shown works and bodies of works which have never been presented together before. Thus, a large selection of letters Chaimowicz has written since the 1970s in widely differing life situations. Their poetic nature reflects another characteristic of Chaimowicz’ work: the power of omission to bring suggestive spaces of imagination and the incomplete into effect.
Another arrangement focuses on the private residence of the architect Roger Diener and his wife, the writer Maryam Diener. Chaimowicz has furnished their place near Basel with floors, lamps, tiles and façade paintings, turning it into a total work of art.
Marc Camille Chaimowicz (b. post-war Paris) established himself in the 1970s London art scene as an artist who merged performance and installation art in a manner as playful as it was critical and sensual. This large-scale survey is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States. It will present Chaimowicz’s cross-disciplinary work in sculpture, painting, video, collage, installation, and design made over his nearly 50 year career, including commissions newly created for the occasion.
