Andrew Kreps Gallery is pleased to present Gustave 2014… the gallery’s first exhibition with London and Dijon-based artist Marc Camille Chaimowicz. Known for his pioneering work of the 1970’s, his work has continued to blur the distinctions between performance and installation, as well as art and life.
Over the past four decades, from the performances and installations in the 70’s through his designs for furniture, ceramics and patterns for mass-produced consumer items, Marc Camille Chaimowicz has developed an unmistakable formal idiom and signature style. His belief in beauty, lightness and elegance is expressed in his preference for graceful curves, delicate forms, and a characteristic palette of pastel shades. This nuanced approach reflects the ambiguity of the artwork, which is always situated somehow “in-between”. Chaimowicz takes pleasure in breaking down the hierarchy of applied and fine art. His pattern designs appear rooted in the painterly vocabulary of modernism, especially that of French painting and literature, to whose legacy he feels attached.
For his show entitled Gustave 2014… Chaimowicz has built a cruciform wall in the middle of the gallery creating intimate interior spaces in which carpet, wallpaper, furniture, painting and prints are installed to create layered and wholly unique tableaus reflecting the artist’s idiosyncratic dandyism. Depicting a place neither here nor there, and in a time not delineated, these environments are imbued with a sense of nostalgia that both resists and invites the viewer. A second “chapter” of prints created from images from his seminal catalog which hi-jacked the traditional form of an interiors magazine are featured along with a slide-projector work, originally exhibited at the Tate which layers images of the artist upon themselves.
In his own words, “We should resist the tyranny of linear time for one which is much more elusive, labyrinthian, gracious and once understood, perhaps even kindly. Once we recognize that it can fold in on itself – wherein, for example, recent events can seem distant and more distant ones seem closer – we then have a greater fluidity of means.”
Marc Camille Chaimowicz was born in postwar Paris and has had major solo exhibitions internationally at the Serpentine Gallery, London, Le Consortium, Dijon, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, Secession, Vienna, Inverleith House, Edinburgh and inaugurated the new Artist Space with a solo installation in 2009. His works have been included in several group shows at Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt; the Tate Britain, Raven Row, and the Royal Academy of Arts all in London and in 2008 his work was included in the Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art.