Camille Henrot’s “A Number of Things” at Hauser & Wirth is a show that unspools like a child’s half-finished thought—part play, part system, part tantrum against the endless loops of logic that structure our world. The exhibition is an exuberant dissection of order and disorder, obsession and randomness, impulse and inhibition. Here, she stacks the cold, calculating mechanics of an abacus against the teeming, organic sprawl of life. The show’s title, a wry nod to the impossibility of making sense of everything, captures Henrot’s knack for teasing out meaning from the arbitrary structures we build to make sense of our days.
Take”1263 / 3612 (Abacus)” (2023–2024)—a hulking bronze, resin, and rubber structure that wobbles between a child’s counting toy and a kind of primitive, ritualistic monument. It recalls those bead maze toys found in pediatric waiting rooms, except here, the sense of innocent play is corrupted by a weightier existential question: what are we counting for? With its stacked rubber beads and barely-there allusion to shoes, the piece suggests the tyranny of optimization—steps tracked, productivity measured, and life lived in increments rather than moments. Henrot is brilliant at making something as basic as a counting device feel eerily sentient, a looming figure bending to the oppressive weight of its own imposed logic.
Then there’s “Richelieu” (2023), one of Henrot’s steel-wool-and-wood dog sculptures, positioned in the gallery like an abandoned companion, left tied to a pole by an absent owner. It’s scrappy and anthropomorphic, full of pathos and presence, yet unmistakably a Frankenstein of materials—something domestic made strange. Henrot’s dogs aren’t sentimental; they speak to dependency, hierarchy, and the unsettling way we design relationships, both human and non-human. The dog becomes a proxy for our own learned behaviors, our need for attachment, and the way we tether ourselves—sometimes voluntarily, sometimes against our will—to structures of control.
Henrot’s “Dos and Don’ts“ series continues her fixation on behavioral conditioning. These paintings, layered with collaged fragments—etiquette book excerpts, computer error messages, dental X-rays, embryology invoices—transform the visual language of organization into something unruly, chaotic, and deeply personal. They evoke the futile, frenetic attempt to impose structure on life’s mess, and in their sheer saturation of information, they do the opposite: they overwhelm, scramble, and distort. Henrot, ever the master of double meanings, suggests that while rules may offer the comfort of structure, they are also suffocating performances.
There’s a generosity to Henrot’s work, an invitation to lean into the absurdity of existence while acknowledging the very real anxieties that come with it. “A Number of Things” is a show about learning—how we learn, what we internalize, and the unspoken systems that shape us. But it is also a show about unlearning, about breaking free from the count, the leash, the rulebook. Henrot leaves us in the liminal space between order and chaos, asking us to decide for ourselves whether to fall in line or let it all fall apart.
