Many lamps are placed in the room or hang into it in a broad arc, as wall lamps. With their pedestals made of mahagony plywood and curved aluminium tubes and the shades decorated in various motifs, the lamps of Marc Camille Chaimowicz illuminate the gallery space in an entirely different fashion than the neon tubes customary in art today. Since the 1980s, Marc Camille Chaimowicz has been making furniture and fixtures once associated with the domestic realm, such as wallpaper, carpets or ceramics. What plays a pivotal role in his artistic practice is the desire for fictions about aesthetic lifestyles between hedonism and functionalism. A formal minimalism counterbalances the ornamental and sweetish romantic aspects of the works. His objects and installations additionally are often underpinned by a nostalgic and partially touching flair; Chaimowicz has a relaxed relationship to kitsch with which he creates a tension to the occasional melancholic undertones of his choreographies. Marc Camille Chaimowicz often arranges different furniture sculptures and objects to still lifes in the gallery space that allude to a speculative lifestyle and refined culture of taste. His presentation in Lueneburg is therefore extraordinary in that it focuses on a single object type, the lamp. And despite the latent “living room atmosphere”, the presentation at Halle fuer Kunst avoids such a fictional mise-en-scène. Instead, the serial hand-made production of articles of daily use is here now brought to the fore. 

The exhibition was realised with the support from Land Niedersachsen, Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung, Sparkassenstiftung Lüneburg, British Council, Lüneburgischer Landschaftsverband, Hansestadt Lüneburg and Cabinet, London. 

With special thanks to Jochen Weber for his creative-technical support. 

Marc Camille Chaimowicz lives in London. Works by the artist have been recently presented at Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, at the Nouveau Musée National Monaco, at the Manifesta, St. Petersburg. In autumn he inaugurated the new premises of gallery Neu in Berlin. In 2015 a solo show will be presented at the FRAC les Abattoires in Toulouse.