The artist Colette Lumiere reminds me, one afternoon at Company Gallery in New York, that she must not be interrupted while she’s preparing for a show. ‘It’s like alchemy,’ she says of her process. ‘God forbid somebody should bother me when I’m working, unless they’re on my team. If they’re on my team and they’re on my wavelength, fine.’ She once shooed away a prince for a lesser offense (more on that later).
Lumiere is readying herself for a presentation at Art Basel in June, where she will showcase a new installation comprised of historical works – postcards bearing snapshots of her now-mythic rooms, wall fragments so thick with ruched fabric that they appear painted – which today resemble excavated antiquities, worn and tattered after years spent scattered across storage facilities. It will be as if ‘you were going to a museum to understand another culture where the monuments were destroyed,’ she describes. ‘You see these wonderful relics that are so beautiful.’ Titled Recently Discovered Ruins of a Dream (2023), the piece will call back to the tableau vivant performances and immersive environments she brought to life throughout the 1970s.
I manage to coax Lumiere out of her creative cocoon, and she arrives at the gallery as if stepping into a daydream. Like a doll waiting to be removed from its packaging, she’s wrapped in layers of pleated blush-colored chiffon, capped by a luscious velvet top hat from which pins jut out in every direction. With glittering pink boots, she stomps on a fox stole that hangs from her shoulders to the ground, leaving a trail of fur about the showroom. I pick up a tuft and tuck it into my purse, waiting for the right moment to return it. With Lumiere – who’s regularly tread the line between dreams and reality, life and art – you never know what will make the archives
Lumiere is standing in the gallery’s doorway when she’s momentarily taken by surprise. A woman walking a dachshund across the street – a friend from years ago – pauses and calls out her name. Lumiere turns and waves a gloved hand. She looks back at me and flips her fox behind her arm. ‘That’s another story,’ she says, laughing. ‘Everything has a story.’
Like a good story, Lumiere’s art – which she has created prolifically across photography, sculpture, music, and other media for more than 50 years – has the power to transport its viewers into a bohemian utopia of punk glamour and pink silk. ‘I believe that art should elevate the spirit,’ she says. ‘I want [the audience] to shift their reality. I want to snap them out of their sleepwalking.’
Born in Tunis, Lumiere fled to New York from France in the late 1960s to escape an unwanted marriage and become an artist. She began as a painter of human-scale canvases and city streets, but it was her installations and the endurance performances she staged within them that made her a star. One such piece was The Transformation of the Sleeping Gypsy without the lion (After Rousseau) (1973), which she showed at Stefanotty Gallery in New York. Nearly every inch of the space’s walls was covered with cinched drapes and fleshy parachutes, until the room became soft and warm, like a womb. Each day, curious visitors flocked to Midtown to watch Lumiere sleeping, peacefully and precariously, on a mattress laid in the center of the gallery.
One of only a handful of women showing with the gallery at the time, Lumiere says she felt like a ‘black sheep.’ While many of her male contemporaries went on to greater success and stability, Lumiere’s creations mocked commerciality or eschewed it altogether. Because of this, she would struggle to maintain consistent representation throughout her career, even as her work touched generations of artists that followed. But, through Steffanoty, she was introduced to Dennis Oppenheim and Roger Welch, two conceptual artists who were also on the gallery’s roster. ‘I had love affairs with both,’ Lumiere says.
Oppenheim and Welch invited Lumiere to travel with them across Europe in the summer of 1977, meeting with dealers in Belgium before visiting art fairs in Switzerland and Germany. ‘They said, “Colette, don’t take all that with you,”’ Lumiere recalls. ‘We’re going in a car. Travel light.’ Lumiere had astutely documented many of her artworks in color photographs printed on postcards, captioned with dates and locations in perfect cursive lettering. She piled these papers into a small box, packed a change of clothes, and boarded a plane from New York.
Once the three artists arrived in Basel, Lumiere split off from the group, fearing the repercussions of the love triangle she’d inadvertently formed. She wandered about the city and came to the fair that would later be known as Art Basel, then in its seventh year, where she bumped into the Italian dealer Massimo Minini. He was gaining notoriety showing conceptual artists like Sol LeWitt and Daniel Buren at Banco, his Brescia-based gallery that had opened four years prior. Though they had only just met, Minini invited Lumiere to perform inside his booth. She used the opportunity – an expensive, commercial platform – to rest.
‘I would just go there and sleep as long as I could. It was very minimal, but it had an impact,’ Lumiere says. Lying atop an inhospitable white platform, she had removed her postcards – the records of her life – from their box and displayed them across the walls behind her. ‘The next thing Dennis and Roger saw was me sleeping in the booth and all these people watching me,’ she recalls. ‘That was very funny.’
The impromptu performance was a sensation. It thrust Lumiere from mostly underground fame stateside into the European spotlight. Come autumn, she would exhibit at the Paris Biennale and Art Cologne. In 1978, Minini offered her his Brescia showroom for a solo exhibition. Lumiere arrived not as Colette but as Justine, the first of many personas she would come to embody. It was there that a prince made the mistake of disrupting her intimate, alchemical workflow. ‘[He] wanted to meet Justine, but she wasn’t very nice,’ Lumiere says. ‘She was on the ladder installing and she goes, “Get the fuck out of here!”’
Recently Discovered Ruins of a Dream is Company Gallery’s latest effort to showcase and preserve Lumiere’s vital work during this period. Partners Sophie Mörner and Taylor Trabulus describe Lumiere as having ‘played a pivotal role in shaping the performance art scene’ in New York. For the gallery’s first show with the artist, November 2021’s ‘Notes on Baroque Living: Colette and Her Living Environment, 1972–1983,’ Lumiere spent months repairing and reimagining a portion of Living Environment (1972–83), an all-consuming transformation of her downtown loft. The salon-like space, where even her television was swallowed by cloth, became the archetype for many of her elaborate rooms and set the scene for a decade of her practice.
Kenta Murakami, who introduced Lumiere to Company Gallery and curated ‘Notes on Baroque Living,’ says: ‘Colette amplifies the alienation she feels as an artist committed to creating a utopic space that exists outside of the suburban sprawl that had taken root throughout America by the 1970s.’ He continues, ‘Her work is representative of the promise that was New York, the promise of bohemia, and the promise of the art world. That’s a promise few can now afford, whether for artists trying to live in our cultural capitals and, in many instances, for galleries showing at fairs. Her statement is all the more risky to reprise today, and therefore all the more necessary.’
Before I leave the gallery, I return the fur clump that fell from Lumiere’s stole. In exchange, she hands me a potato that she’s painted so that it glimmers bright and yellow in the light – a remnant from her time living in Berlin, in the mid-1980s, under the pseudonym Mata Hari and the Stolen Potatoes. ‘Being joyful is completely underrated,’ Lumiere says, before diving into an epic about how she worked to win over a group of ‘very serious, very macho’ artists in Germany. ‘That doesn’t do anything for anyone. How can you help people if you’re not feeling good yourself?’
I sit back down for another story.
Colette Lumiere is represented by Company Gallery, New York. In June, her work will be on view in the Feature sector at Art Basel in Basel.
Coco Romack is a writer, editor, and author based in New York.
All photos by Tonje Thilesen for Art Basel.
Published on May 30, 2023.