Mother Love and Puppy Love, With All Their Twists and Turns

It is not often that those of us setting out in Chelsea for an afternoon of gallery-going find ourselves mesmerized by a floor. But Camille Henrot, a French-born, New York-based multimedia artist, entices you to gaze downward at Hauser & Wirth. In the place of the usual expanse of poured and polished gray concrete, Henrot has devised a surface of wall-to-wall green rubber overpainted with the crisscrossing lines of a modernist grid. She might be the first artist in history to aspire to imbue the chaste space of a mega-gallery with the accident-proof look of a toddler’s play room.

Opposite the entrance to the gallery, a visitor encounters 10 smallish sculptures of dogs, each on a store-bought leash and tethered to a central pole. It’s as if a dog walker stopped by to see the show and then disappeared, leaving the pups unattended and without water. Does the dog walker know that it happens to be illegal in New York City to tie or chain a dog in a public space for longer than three hours? The question goes to the heart of Henrot’s hugely engaging exhibition, “A Number of Things,” a substantial gathering of sculptures and paintings that analyze the conventions of care (be it for children or pets) and the emotions they generate, from enraptured attachment to aching need.

That said, Henrot’s work is impressively free of didacticism and attentive to the differences among individual dogs. “Francesco,” as one sculpture is titled, is a French bulldog roughly carved from a block of wood. “Margaret” — an icon of the junk-into-art tradition of assemblage — has been cobbled together from a crumpled brown gym bag balanced atop four steel strips for legs. “Sammy,” a dachshund, is descended from Picasso’s open sheet-metal sculptures. “Richelieu,” an Afghan hound covered in hanging clumps of steel wool, could be the offspring of Giacometti’s skin-and-bones “Dog.”

And don’t miss “Herbert,” the most angular and abstract, who basically looks like a Bauhaus building on a leash. The saddest and cutest is surely “Hélix,” a coppery pup with almond-shaped eyes, pointy ears and a body that resembles a sweet potato. Missing her hind legs, she gets around on a pair of prosthetic stroller wheels.

To ask a blunt question: Are these sculptures, or are they pull toys for 4-year-olds? Henrot’s sculptures are hybrid objects that cleverly combine the clichés of 20th century art, especially Surrealism’s curving bean shapes, with forms borrowed from the mass-produced world of children’s playthings. She wants to convey the small, vulnerable, unheroic feelings that the big dogs of modernism refused to acknowledge in their quest for aesthetic purity and grand effects. You can see her as a direct heir of Louise Bourgeois, who was also French-born and psychologically inclined, although Henrot is more amused and ironic in her rambles through the attic of sculptural history.

Now 46, Henrot has lived in New York since 2011. Her show at Hauser & Wirth is her first at that gallery and accompanied by a significant level of advertising, of which I became aware when I received my February issue of The Atlantic. There, on the back cover, is a full-page photograph of Henrot at work in a metal foundry. Slender, with flaxen hair, she is wearing coveralls and what look like a pair of thick leather work gloves. She holds a torch and calmly aims a jet of blue-violet flame at the surface of a giant bronze sculpture, presumably to deepen its color in the process known as patination. Although you see only part of the sculpture, it has an undulant monumentality about it, like a great wave rolling in.

Henrot can fairly be called a star on the international art circuit, although as a multimedia artist, that nebulous hyphenate, she lacks a signature style. She earned her first renown for “Grosse Fatigue,” a 13-minute color video that relates the story of the earth’s creation in rhythmic, rapping beats. (“In the beginning … there was no beginning,” a voice intones catchily. You can watch it on YouTube.) It was first shown at the 2013 Venice Biennale, where Henrot won a Silver Lion award for most promising new artist. In addition to films and videos, she can claim a prodigious and buoyant output of drawings. In 2023, she published a volume of personal essays about motherhood, “Milkyways.”

The heart of the current show belongs to her Abacus series — three large-scale bronze sculptures, all from 2024, titled after the ancient counting device and embellished with amber-colored beads that you can actually touch and slide along rods. “73/37 (Abacus)” — the title of the sculpture partly visible in the magazine advertisement — doesn’t disappoint in person. It is a vision of fluid female power, a wavy, upwardly angled chunk of bronze equipped with a pair of magnified fly eyes and crowned by an acrobat’s aerial hoop. As an art student in Paris, Henrot studied film animation, which may explain why her sculptures disobey the laws of gravity and suggest motion.

“347/743 (Abacus),” by contrast, is a sky-high, openly looping object based on the classic “bead maze” toy that challenges preschool children to slide wooden beads across a tangle of painted wires. Henrot’s 17-foot-tall version requires that you look up. And up. Although it is certifiably abstract, it is impressively allusive and sets off a gratifying chain of associations. As I walked around it, I variously espied intimations of a Calder-style circus giraffe; tall reeds waving in a breeze; and two wiry women, one hovering protectively over the other.

A third large-scale bronze, “1263/3612 (Abacus)” is more Dali-esque and cartoony, with long, dangling limbs in the place of a torso or a body. Standing eight feet tall, its rodlike lengths of metal slope though space, suggesting a right-angle triangle or a playground slide. Its surface shimmers with a girlie patina of iridescent pink and turns stacks of abacus beads into bangle bracelets.

The show at Hauser & Wirth also includes 10 works described as paintings, which presumes an elastic definition of what a painting is. They’re actually digital collages enhanced with brushstrokes that run the gamut from freely tossed traceries of pigment to computer-generated marks. They belong to Henrot’s recent series called “Dos and Don’ts,” whose title comes from a stack of old-fashioned etiquette manuals she found in her mother’s house.

Some of the paintings simulate the look of a desktop screen with seven tabs open at the same time. In keeping with the current taste for autofiction, she weaves in such personal material (often scanned and enlarged) as photographs of her two children, a strip of black-and-white dental X-rays, a bill from an egg-storage company, and a stamped envelope from Who’s Who in France. You may feel sympathetic when you see a painting papered over with a string of code signaling a computer malfunction.

Her paintings at times look schematic and labored, and in general pale beside the sculptures. They seem familiar, a digital gloss on the long-established innovations of Pop art. Her concatenations of oversized collage elements hark back to the early paintings of James Rosenquist. Her frequent use of a single, oversize, floating brushstroke — a kind of frozen-looking bacon slice done with the help of an app called Procreate — puts you in mind of Laura Owens, Roy Lichtenstein and other top non-expressionists who have emptied the traditional brushstroke of its angsty possibilities and embraced the clichés of commercial printing.

Still, one comes away from this show excited by her sculptures. Much has been written, in both fiction and nonfiction, about the challenges faced by working mothers, but imagine trying to make a sculpture on that infinitely complex subject.

Henrot does just that her emotionally resonant sculpture, “La Pause.” It consists of a pair of heavy work gloves, cast in bronze and displayed on the floor, without a pedestal. It’s as if the artist, in need of a break, took off her gloves, threw them down in a random spot on the floor, and ran out the door. Where did she go and when is she coming back? “La Pause” makes you feel the weight of a mother’s absence, as well as the anxiety experienced by the substantial part of the world’s junior population that is forever screaming, “Mom, where are you?”

Camille Henrot: A Number of Things

Through April 12, Hauser & Wirth, 542 West 22nd Street, Manhattan; 212 790 3900, HauserWirth.com.