AMSTERDAM.- De Appel presents the first Dutch solo exhibition of the French/British artist Marc Camille Chaimowicz who has only recently been more widely recognized for the idiosyncratic oeuvre developed over almost 35 years. It is the second time that the artist will be shown by de Appel, for in April 1980 Wies Smals invited Chaimowicz to present the performance/installation “Partial Eclipse”. Now, with the complicity of the curator Alexis Vaillant (FR), the decision was made to combine a broad range of works by Marc Camille Chaimowicz with notably numerous architectural models and artworks by a select group of international artists whom the artist feels empathy with. Conceived in the spirit of a playful inquiry and ‘flânerie’ - characteristic of the perception of the artist's idiosyncratic dandyism, this exhibition highlights the idea that an artistic production can function on a parallel level to its mental ‘backdrop’.

In 1972, Marc Camille Chaimowicz first showed “Celebration? Realife”, a cult ground-breaking immersive scatter environment, as well as a performance piece that can be read as a consciously messy and ambivalent reaction to the clean conceits of Conceptualist and post-Minimalist tendencies. According to art historian Tom Holert, “Celebration? Realife” "makes a strategic and important mediation on the changing role of the artist, who in this defining work simultaneously becomes art director, stage designer, choreographer and participant." Parallel to his performances and installations that anticipate the relationships between art, design and popular culture, he made colorful, decorative wallpaper patterns, models, technical drawings as well as ‘environments’, wittily composed interiors ‘decorated’ with collages, oil paintings, carpets, folding screens, ceramics, furniture, architectural objects and self-designed wallpaper and fabrics developed in the 1980s and 1990s, works that testify to a fascination by the contrasts between private and public space. Long before it became fashionable, he integrated his day-today activities into his artistic work and transformed conventional manners and interpersonal behavior into core components of his installations and environments. By probing the decorative possibilities of art, he notably raises questions about the conventional hierarchy that puts fine art above applied art.

The exhibition may be understood as a ‘collective retrospective’ which makes no attempt to present a quasi-museological, chronological overview of the artist’s oeuvre by showing his most representative works. A range of works by Marc Camille Chaimowicz's and a revisited installation of 1975 ("We Chose Our Words With Care, That Neon- Moonlight Evening; It Was As If We Were Party to a Wonderful Alchemy") are combined with works by other artists with whom the artist and the curator have established visual and conceptual links so that the artist’s personal mental world will unfold before the spectator in an associatively organized presentation. The multiple inversions proper to Chaimowicz's work as well as its nonsubordination to a particular form over thirty-five years of production give the exhibition the status of a "potential space" rather than of a disembodied brainstorm.

With:
Anonymous, Richard Artschwager, Nairy Baghramian, Joseph Beuys, Tom Burr, James Lee Byars, Enrico David, Emile Guy, Michael Krebber, Jason Meadows, Clémence Meunier, Jozef Peeters, Loïc Raguénès, Gerrit Thomas Rietveld, Elsa Schiaparelli, Lily van der Stokker, Amikam Toren

And featuring "Jean Cocteau" (2003-2008).