The streets across the Champs-Élysées in Paris are lined with retailers promoting luxurious commodities; home windows are filled with shows of extravagant wealth, proffering rings, watches and diamond-set necklaces in gold and platinum. One house within the district, nonetheless, is devoid of this glitz: Hanna Rochereau has turned Hauser & Wirth’s showrooms into an deserted jewelry store. The exhibition is the primary in a brand new sequence, ‘Hauser & Wirth Invite(s)’, which welcomes early-career artists to inhabit the gallery’s normally personal second ground. Rochereau’s sculptures and work reference the furnishings, window dressings and packaging of the bustling streets outdoors. Nevertheless, they’re stripped of treasured metals and folks, forsaking incongruously stacked vitrines and piles of dusty packing containers.
In her work, Rochereau works from images of store home windows and storerooms, discovered on-line or taken herself, eradicating their unique contexts and stripping away markers of commerce – logos, textual content and the saturated polish of the commodity. Among the many six work offered right here, this may be seen in new works like Misplaced within the Field (2025) and Untitled (2025), the place densely layered black acrylic swirls throughout the backgrounds of her canvases. These darkly painted sections protrude from the canvas, draping over and round stacks of naked packing containers, emptied paper procuring baggage, unwritten indicators and wood frames, their tariffs whited out to depart clean work inside work. This stark textural and tonal distinction offers the sense of a thick curtain lifted for a second, permitting a glimpse of what’s hidden beneath.
Within the centre of the room is the set up Display in Play / Out of Play (2025), a sequence of wooden and glass show circumstances for jewelry piled on high of each other. Their wood elements are sanded down, revarnished and tarnished to go well with the pale parquet ground and white partitions of the gallery. They sit between show and decay, their up-ended compartments suggesting one thing each preserved and forgotten. Positioned across the work’s surfaces and inside its vitrines are sculptures made out of stands utilized in a previous life to show rings, earrings and necklaces. Titled ‘Containers in Containers #9 – #15’ (2025), they’re constructed from white and clear Perspex fashioned in contours suggesting a breastbone, glass-like pillars or the tender break up pillow of an open ring field during which gold may sit. Although they’re absent from Rochereau’s sculptures, the suggestion of those sought-after objects stays. Coiled ribbons of silver plastic trace on the shining metals that when adorned these show fashions, offering a glistering hint of the industrial world that lent these objects worth by affiliation.
Most works have interaction instantly with the gallery’s environment, however one portray, Untitled (2024), depicting stacks of shoeboxes, introduces a shift in focus, hinting on the exhibition’s second chapter, when it is going to relocate to Shmorévaz, a mission house housed in a former shoe store, on 29 March. The shoeboxes mix the birthdates of the artist’s shut mates with the yr the work was made. The packing containers, with their connections to figures unknown to the viewer, recommend one thing which isn’t on view: collections of private reminiscences and histories. This captures the broader atmosphere of Rochereau’s presentation: the works sit between previous lives and afterlives; these are objects which have been touched, dealt with, displayed, discarded and at the moment are reassembled in a sort of archival suspension. Immersed in an ambient eeriness, this exhibition has an unnerving high quality – a hauntology of the clean and forgotten showroom, the place the remnants of show outlast what they as soon as framed. In a district constructed on the spectacle of luxurious, Rochereau’s works compel their viewers to think about what stays when commerce fades, and whether or not modern artwork itself shares on this spectral existence.
‘Hauser & Wirth Invite(s): Hanna Rochereau’ is on view at Hauser & Wirth, Paris, till 12 March
Major picture: Hanna Rochereau, Ceaselessly (element), 2024, acrylic on canvas, 160 × 70 cm. Courtesy: © Hanna Rochereau, Shmorévaz, Paris, and Hauser & Wirth, Paris; {photograph}: Nicolas Brasseur
