Marc Camille Chaimowicz | One to One ...

Since the 1970s, Marc Camille Chaimowicz has explored the space between art, life, and decoration. He develops interiors and spatial arrangements as well as various furnishings and decorative objects, paintings, vases, curtains, furniture, and wallpaper. In his work, Chaimowicz blurs the boundaries between private and public space. His formal language—in painting, interiors, and arrangements—perhaps refers to intimist painting from the late nineteenth century, including work by artists such as Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard. At the same time, it shows a fondness for modernist design, as exemplified by Dieter Rahms or Charles and Ray Eames. He has created the new installation One to One … (2017) for the Kestner Gesellschaft, a full-scale treatise on his new apartment in Vauxhall, London. As such, the exhibition One to One … will become a surrogate and stage for the design of this real-life living space.

Chaimowicz’s apartment is alluded to in this large-scale installation with sage-green skirting boards and patterned curtains. The walls are a dusty plaster pink and recall a stage set due to their provisionary construction. Wallpapered Campari bottles demark certain rooms, and plans on a cork wall trace the construction of the London apartment and the exhibition at the Kestner Gesellschaft. The living room extends over the partially open boundaries of the skirting boards into the exhibition space at the Kestner Gesellschaft, where additional drawings and plans for his works are displayed. In collaboration with Lise Queinnec, a series of photographs of Chaimowicz’s apartment in Vauxhall was created for the exhibition.

Marc Camille Chaimowicz is presenting the work The Props and Wardrobe Room (2011/2017) in the second exhibition space on the upper floor, which references Jean Genet’s play The Maids (1947), as well as a series of stage curtains that he designed, Rideaux de Scène, Théâtre Jean-Vilar, Bourgoin-Jallieu (1991–1992). The Props and Wardrobe Room, a freestanding room with two small windows, offers visitors insights into the material construction of the characters in the play. The piece is a chamber drama about power relations and human abysses in which fiction and reality, role and identity are blurred. The central themes of the play, such as playing with roles and identity, or the transition between the stage and an intimate space, are reflected in Chaimowicz’s oeuvre.

Marc Camille Chaimowicz was born in Paris after the Second World War and lives and works in London and Burgundy. Chaimowicz has had solo exhibitions at Flat Time House, London (2016); Indipendenza, Rome (2016); MD72, Berlin (2011); Nottingham Contemporary (2011); Inverleith House, Edinburgh (2011); Secession, Vienna (2009); Artists Space, New York (2009); and De Appel, Amsterdam (2008), among others. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions at venues including the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco (2014); Manifesta 10, Hermitage, St. Petersburg (2014); the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, (2014); Tate Modern, London (2012); the SculptureCenter, New York (2011); Hayward Gallery, London (2010); the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2009); and the 5th Berlin Biennale (2008).

The exhibition is supported by the Stiftung Niedersachsen and the Förderkreis der Kestner Gesellschaft.