NEW YORK, NY.- Opening September 9, Public Art Fund will present Camille Henrot: Dogs, the artist’s first public exhibition in New York City, featuring 15 new sculptures at the entrance to Central Park. Building on an existing series and created in a wide range of materials—including bronze, stone, steel, and concrete—each dog’s distinct characteristics come through in the most subtle of crafted gestures.

For Henrot, dogs are a way to speak about the nature of attachment and delegated care—a species whose very existence addresses questions of the domestic and social class in our everyday lives. Each work starts from an accumulation of visual references, including Saul Steinberg drawings, Tex Avery cartoons, ancient Egyptian sculpture, dog show competitions, and more. For Public Art Fund, Henrot has created works in materials ranging from the bronze Odon (2026), towering at seven feet tall, to Cosima (2026), a stretching poodle made of concrete resin. Visitors will encounter this pack of leashed dogs in Doris C. Freedman Plaza, located at the southeast entrance of Central Park.

“Each of Henrot’s sculptures has its own unique presence, mirroring the many shapes, sizes, and temperaments of the canine companions she encounters throughout her Upper West Side neighborhood,” said Melanie Kress, Senior Curator at Public Art Fund. “At once a celebration of craft and style, the exhibition is shaped by Paris-born Henrot’s love for New York City—a place where diversity of expression is on constant display, in both people and their beloved companions.”

Henrot’s virtuosic practice spans painting, drawing, film, animation, installation, and sculpture, and often explores the shaping of civilization – the etiquette, laws, and education that govern our lives and define what it means to be civil. As the ultimate representation of domestication, dogs, as a species, point to the ways these codes are learned, rather than innate.

“Care can be a double-edged sword. We care in order to provide a safe and comfortable environment wherein others can thrive, but the process also shapes and molds them, perhaps against their natural instincts and inclinations,” Henrot said. “As a domesticated animal, dogs sit in the middle ground between nature and humans. They are a way to talk about domestication, civility and education in a broad sense – the training we are given to ‘fit in,’ to conform, to be polite – which also offers us an entry point to bigger ideas of revolution, change, how things can be different.”





As her first outdoor public exhibition in New York, Dogs ultimately reflects Henrot’s love for New York City as a place of insistent individuality. Installed at the entrance to Central Park, the exhibition invites audiences to encounter Henrot’s sculptures within the rhythms of everyday urban life, where the works animate the threshold between the city and the park while prompting reflection on empathy, connection, and the many forms companionship can take.

Camille Henrot: Dogs is curated by Public Art Fund Senior Curator Melanie Kress.

Camille Henrot (born 1978, France) is recognized as one of the most influential voices in contemporary art today. Over the past twenty years, she has developed a critically acclaimed practice, encompassing drawing, painting, sculpture, installation and film. Inspired by literature, second-hand marketplaces, poetry, cartoons, social media, self-help, and the banality of everyday life, Henrot’s works capture the complexity of living as both private individuals and global citizens in an increasingly connected and over-stimulated world.

In 2013, Henrot received widespread critical acclaim for her film “Grosse Fatigue”, made during a fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution and awarded the Silver Lion at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. Henrot is the recipient of the 2014 Nam June Paik Award and the 2015 Edvard Munch Award, and has participated in the Lyon, Berlin, Sydney and Liverpool Biennials, among others. Henrot has had numerous solo exhibitions worldwide, including the New Museum, New York; Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin; Art Sonje Center, Seoul; Fondazione Memmo, Rome; and Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Japan, among others. Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Guggenheim, the Centre Pompidou, and the National Gallery of Victoria, among others.

In 2026, Henrot premiered her new film In The Veins at the New Museum, New York and LUMA, Arles. She also presents a major performative survey exhibition at Copenhagen Contemporary through to the end of 2026. Henrot’s first theatrical production Commedia dell’arte will have its New York premiere at the end of September at L’Alliance New York Florence Gould Theater, a co-commission between Performa, Aspen Art Museum / Wheeler Opera House and LYRA Art Foundation.