Colette Lumiere

Colette Lumiere (as she’s currently styling herself) is a groundbreaking Tunisian-born French-American multimedia performance artist. From the early 1970s onwards, she has continuously explored various artistic practices like painting, street art, and performance art whilst also, from time to time, embarking on careers within the fields of design and music (creating the ‘Deadly Feminine’ clothing line for Fiorucci and releasing the album Beautiful Dreamer, both in 1979). Her most talked about works have been created within the fields of photographic tableaux vivants (French: 'living picture’, a static scene containing one or more actors or models, stationary and silent, usually in costume, carefully posed, with props and/or scenery combining aspects of theatre and the visual arts) and installations (often involving one or several rooms) in the form of soft fabric environments, where she often appeared as the focal point and central element.

A recurring feature of her artistic practice has centred on Colette’s construction of various public personas. As David J. Getsy, PhD (born 1973, American art historian and curator, Eleanor Shea Professor of Art History at the University of Virginia), puts it (in ‘Waking Dreams: Colette’s Performance Art. Beyond the artist’s dreaming image lies an icon in complete control’, Broadcast, supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, 10 October 2023):

Since she started making work in the early ’70s, Colette has constantly reinvented herself. She began as a painter, but quickly realized that she wanted to exceed the bounds of the canvas. Her work since has mixed art and life, moving her visions into public. She was an early practitioner of the street art and performance that flourished in New York in the decade, making rogue, early-morning paintings of cryptic symbols on streets and sidewalks. She would come to be an installation artist, fashion designer, and leader of a rock band that played in the downtown music scene. […] She has transformed herself many times and had many names: Colette, Justine, Lumière, Mata Hari, Countess Reichenbach, Olympia, and Colette de la Victoire, among others. Each of her new identities has offered both an infiltration and a critique of the systems of value, fame, commodity, and art—always pushing the boundaries of what art might be and what we might expect it to look like.

Colette’s first, legendary, transformation took place at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1978, when she staged her own death, only to reappear some days later at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Centre, reincarnated as Justine, the lead singer of the band Justine & The Victorian Punks and the executor of the Colette Is Dead Co. She had seen how artists—particularly women artists—never became famous until they died, so she sped up the process and watched the results. The Colette Is Dead Co. was a conceptual lifework that stands with other critical appropriations of the corporate or institutional form in postwar art. The 1979 Justine & The Victorian Punks album, Beautiful Dreamer, circulated on DJs’ decks and in the charts, and her band performed in New York venues like the legendary Mudd Club (nightclub, located at 77 White Street in the TriBeCa neighborhood of Lower Manhattan, New York City, operating from 1978 to 1983 as a venue for post-punk underground music and counterculture events) and Danceteria (nightclub that operated in New York City from 1980 until 1986. Colette gave Danceteria its motto in the form of a commissioned wall drawing that read Fuck Art Let’s Dance) in the following years. As pointed out by David J. Getsy, ‘Colette blended punk concerts, fashion shows, ad hoc site-specific installations, and performance art. […] Her style, her window displays, her band, and her designs fuelled and forecasted the fusion of music, fashion, advertising, and club culture that would characterise the early 1980s.’

Colette’s probably most talked about work was begun in 1972-1973 with the transformation of her Pearl Street apartment into an artwork called Living Environment. Walls, floors, and ceilings were all covered with cascading pastel fabric to create a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total environment in which Colette’s style merged with the apartment’s. It became part of her mystical allure as well as an ongoing experiment in the practice of life as art until around 1983-1984, when Colette moved to Germany. Living Environment (made largely of ruched parachute material) was eventually put into storage after a failed attempt by the legendary New York gallerist Leo Castelli to secure a permanent home for it (the work had nearly been acquired by Stockholm’s Museum of Modern Art, but the deal fell through. A portion of it was, however, reconstructed at Company Gallery, New York, in 2021.) In 1977, Colette told a reporter from the New York Times, ‘I call it my landscape. Like a chameleon, an animal that changes color for protection, I can blend into this environment—it’s like being in another world.’ In addition to this ever-evolving domestic art installation, Colette later also developed the Beautiful Dreamer series (1978–1982), which extended her fusion of art and life to a nonstop performance. Inspired by the forms of Living Environment, Colette began inventing new versions of her unique antiquarian style to create daily uniforms, which she would wear as an ‘experiment in walking architecture.’

Colette’s playful postmodern take on popular culture still touches upon important aspects of contemporary life, as pointed out by David J. Getsy:

While some have criticized her sibylline self-commercialization as selling out, this shortsighted dismissal overlooks the larger project in which Colette has been engaged: critical mimicry as a means to infiltrate commodity culture. She has dubbed this strategy ‘Reverse Pop.’ Whereas Pop artists appropriated popular culture as art, Colette has tactically made conceptual performance into popular culture, blending the two. Colette’s ‘Reverse Pop’ has been charged with being uncomfortably close to actual fashion, commerce, and music—befuddling those who want to keep it all artificially separate. For many, Colette’s Duchampian play with popular culture is confused with her strategic and near-total camouflage, often to the point where critics are ensnared into seeing her mimicry as the real thing. Her impact and its absorption into popular culture continue to be felt. As recently as 2012, Colette created the protest performance Thanks a Lot on the sidewalk outside the flagship Barneys New York store during their season-long ‘Gaga’s Workshop,’ a collaboration with Lady Gaga. The pop star’s window display, ‘Gaga’s Boudoir,’ had far too many similarities to Colette’s interiors and window installations to be ignored.

Despite Colette’s pioneering impact, far too many in the art world seem surprisingly unfamiliar with her name. Thankfully the last decade or so has experienced a burgeoning resurgence of interest in her work. In 2013, for example, Bomb Magazine published an interview with Colette (‘Colette Lumière. The Iconic Colette Lumière on her Numerous Personas and her influence on Pop Culture’) by the writer Katie Peyton Hofstadter, which introduced a new generation to her work.

This interest reached a new peak in 2021-2022, when Company Gallery, New York (which now represents Colette), staged its first solo exhibition of her work, Notes on Baroque Living: Colette and Her Living Environment, 1972-1983, bringing together elements of the Living Environment, including mixed-media paintings, sculptures, light boxes, costumes, short films, music, performance documentation, and ephemera. Then, in 2023, Company Gallery presented a restaging of one of Colette’s sleeping works—this time with a synthetic sculpture of the artist— to acclaim at Art Basel. This was followed up by yet another solo exhibition at Company Gallery in 2025: Everything She Touches Turns To Gold, delving into Colette’s Berlin era of the 1980s, when she worked under the pseudonym Mata Hari and the Stolen Potatoes.

These recent exhibitions have confirmed Colette’s enduring contemporaneity in the international art world, or as Morgane Richer La Flèche (self-taught Canadian-born and New York-based multidisciplinary artist, born 1992) so eloquently puts it (quoted by Katie White in ’Why Don’t More People Know Colette, the Shape-Shifting Punk Victorian Queen of 20th-Century Art?’, Artnet News, 25 February 2025):

She uses photography to build personas in a way that is so contemporary. The fluidity between her artistic process, her fashion, and her storytelling merges documentation and performance. Colette helped create the language that artists who grew up on Instagram are fluent in. She’s an original, and I think her refusal to bend to a boring definition of the serious artist makes her appeal to an irreverent generation.

Colette is represented in, amongst other, the following prestigious institutions Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut, U.S.A.; Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, U.S.A.; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, U.S.A.; MOCA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, California, U.S.A.; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, Germany and Wolfsonian–Florida International University FIU Museum, Miami, Florida, U.S.A.

Since 1973 Colette has been showing her work in international solo exhibitions like Sandwomen, Stefonatty Gallery, New York, NY, U.S.A. (1973); My Living Environment (re-installation), Cologne Art Fair, Cologne, Germany (1977); Justine and Victorian Punks, P.S 1 Contemporary Art Centre, New York, NY, U.S.A. (1978); Justine’s Special Christmas Gifts, Elizabeth Weiner Gallery, New York, NY, U.S.A. (1979); 10-year Retrospective, Kunstverein Munster, Munster, Germany (1981); Persona, New Museum, New York, NY, U.S.A. (1981); Other Realities, Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston, Texas, U.S.A. (1981); Mata Hari: Paintings, Silvia Menzel Gallery, Berlin (1984); Autobiographs, Daniel Newburg Gallery, Washington D.C. (1986); Colette and the Russians, Galerie Dany Keller, Munich, Germany (1986); An Exhibition for Dolls, Daniel Newburg Gallery, Washington D.C. (1987); Bavarian Adventure, Frauen Museum, Bonn, Germany (1988); Kunstverein, Munich, Germany (1989); Visits to the Normal World, Carol Johnssen Gallery, Munich, Germany (1990); Olympia Practices Being in Two Places at One Time, Rempire Gallery, New York, NY, U.S.A. (1991); The Rise and the Ruins of the House of Olympia, LOK Gallery, New York, NY, U.S.A. (1993); House of Olympia, Beatice Wasserman, Cologne, Germany (1994); Uptown, Downtown Gallery, New York, NY, U.S.A. (1994); Colette in the Museums, Galerie Carol Johnssen, Munich, Germany (1999); Colette Goes Banking, Merck Finck Bank & Co., Berlin (2000); Maison Lumiere, Eggizio’s Project, New York, NY, U.S.A. (2001); Solo Exhibition, Stiftung Starke, Berlin (2001); Maison Lumiere, New York, NY, U.S.A. (2002); The Opening of the Colette Lounge, Löwen Palais, Berlin (2003); Domestic Bliss and the Colette Look, Rosenthal Showroom, New York, NY, U.S.A. (2004); The Bedroom, HGRP Building, Tokyo (2004); C.I.A. (Colette Institute of Art), Crowbar, New York, NY, U.S.A. (2004); La Vie en Rose, Pablo’s Birthday, New York, NY, U.S.A. (2006); Lumière’s Dinner at Eight, Galerie Carol Johnssen, Munich, Germany (2006); Intriguing Faces, Vivian Horan Gallery, New York, NY, U.S.A. (2007); Politically Colette, curated by Alan Jones, Paolo Barozzi, Venice, Italy (2011); Pirate in Venice, Laboratorie Lumiere, Gershwin Hotel, New York, NY, U.S.A. (2012); Colette and Sandy, 83 Leonard Street, New York, NY, U.S.A. (2013); Love in the Attic…Mermaid in the Closet, Mitchell Algus Gallery, New York, NY, U.S.A. (2017); Lumiere Occupies the Lowen Palais II, Starke Foundation, Berlin (2017); Germany Berlin Diaries, Seven Star Gallery, Berlin (2018); Berlin Night Drawings, Susanne Albrecht Gallery, Berlin (2018); Lumiere’s Adventures in Zulu Land II, The Eye Never Sleeps Festival, Poland (2018); The Rehearsal, Starke Foundation, Berlin (2019); 9 Clean Up Time, Stiftung Starke, Berlin (2019); Notes on Baroque Living: Colette and Her Living Environment, 1972-1983, Company Gallery, New York, NY, U.S.A. (2021-2022); Art Basel: Recently Discovered Ruins of A Dream, Company Gallery, Basel, Switzerland (2023); Horror Vacui: Colette Lumiere, XENOMANIA, New York, NY, U.S.A. (2023-2024); Souvenirs de Voyage, Public Presentation at Explora, Paris (2024) and Everything She Touches Turns To Gold, Company Gallery, New York, NY, U.S.A. (2025).

To this can also be added the following long list of group exhibitions Homage to Delacroix, Courtyard Gallery, New Buffalo, Michigan, U.S.A. (1972); Persephone’s Bedroom, Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach, Florida, U.S.A. (1974); The Dream Series with Installation Real Dream, The Clocktower, New York, NY, U.S.A. (1975); Rooms, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Centre, New York, NY, U.S.A. (1976); It Re-appear, Cucalon Gallery, New York, NY, U.S.A. (1977); Clearance Sale, Gillesby/De Laage Gallery, Paris (1977); Let them Eat Cake, Paris Biennale, Paris (1977); Camille II, MoMA, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. (1977); Out of the House, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. (1978); New Paintings Installation, Barbara Braathen Gallery, New York, NY, U.S.A. (1983); Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (1984); Downtown NY, Akademie der Künste, Berlin (1985); The Aristocrats, Carol Johnssen Gallery, Munich, Germany (1992); The Invisible Body, group show, Rempire Gallery, New York, NY, U.S.A. (1992); Home Exhibition, MOMA, Lausanne, Switzerland (1995); MOCA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California, U.S.A. (1995); Constructed Photographs, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany (1995); Au Revoir Olympia, 8th Floor Gallery, New York, NY, U.S.A. (1997); New York Art/Fashion, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, U.S.A. (1997); Le Salon De La Refusee, Gerswin Gallery, New York, NY, U.S.A. (1997); New Perspectives, Galerie Carol Johnssen, Munich, Germany (1997); Reconceptualizations of the Tableaux Vivant, New York, NY, U.S.A. (1998); Re-Duchamp, Goldstrom Gallery, New York, NY, U.S.A. (1998); Multi Media Event, Limelight, New York, NY, U.S.A. (1999); Fondation de la Tapisserie, Brussels (2000); Corpus Christi, Museum of Contemporary Art, Texas, U.S.A. (2000); Before and After the Smoke, Carol Johnssen Gallery, New York, NY, U.S.A. (2001); 3rd Montreal Biennale, Montreal, Canada (2002); PPOW Gallery, New York, NY, U.S.A. (2002); Before and After the Smoke, Galerie Carol Johnssen, Munich, Germany (2002); Über die Malerei in der Photographie, Galerie Carol Johnssen, Munich, Germany (2003); From the Other Side of the Sky, UNESCO, Paris (2003); Face to Face, Galerie Carol Johnssen, Munich, Germany (2005); High Noon, Galerie Carol Johnssen, Munich, Germany (2005); Clothesline Exhibition, Santa Fe Art Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico, U.S.A. (2005); Colette Appearance at the Foyer, Löwen Palais, Berlin (2005); La Robe, UNESCO, Paris (2005); Sexhandel, Frauen Museum, Bonn, Germany (2006); Reverse Pop, Haus der Kultur, Germany (2006); DowntownNYC, Grey Art Gallery, New York, NY, U.S.A. (2006); The Apartment, HPGRP Gallery, New York, NY, U.S.A. (2007); The Closet, Windows Gallery, Long Island City, NY, U.S.A. (2007); Colette Lounge, Löwen Palais, Berlin (2008); React Feminism, Akademie Der Künste, Berlin (2008); Interieur Exterieur, Wolfsburg Museum, Wolfsburg, Germany (2008); New Metaphysical Portraits, Black and White Gallery, New York, NY, U.S.A. (2009); …that is all she wrote…, Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, New York, NY, U.S.A. (2009); Pose/Expose, curated by Toke, I.M.O Gallery, Copenhagen (2009); Performa 2009: 100 Years of Performance, curated by Klaus Biesenbach and Kate Macnamara, MoMA PS1, Brooklyn, NY, U.S.A. (2009); …that is all she wrote…, Dinter Fine Art - Project Room, New York, NY, U.S.A. (2009); 10th Barcelona Contemporary Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona, Spain (2010); Colette, Maison Lumiere Unveiling New Works, New York, NY, U.S.A. (2010); Girl Talk, Pavel Zoubok Gallery, New York, NY, U.S.A. (2010); Consider The Oyster, James Graham Gallery, curated by Ingrid Dinter, New York, NY, U.S.A. (2010); BASIC INSTINCT, curated by Sasha Okshteyn, Black and White Project, Brooklyn, NY, U.S.A. (2011); NYC Salon, curated by Michelle Fillou, Dorian Grey Art Gallery, New York, NY, U.S.A. (2011); White Sale, curated by Beth Rudin Dewoody, Loretta Howard Gallery, New York, NY, U.S.A. (2011); Basic Instinct, Flanders Gallery, curated by Sasha Oksthteyn, Raleigh, North Carolina, U.S.A. (2011); Summer Salt, curated by Ingrid Dinter, The Proposition Gallery, New York, NY, U.S.A. (2011); Sweet&Savory, Pavel Zoubok Galley, New York, NY, U.S.A. (2011); The Von Show; Reward Has Anybody Seen Gaga, curated by Emil Memon, Von, New York, NY, U.S.A. (2012); The Quality of Presence, curated by Dimitri Komis, Chelsea Hotel, New York, NY, U.S.A. (2012); Art Returns to Art, Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence, Italy (2012); Come Closer, Art Around the Bowery 69-89, curated by Ethan Swan, New Museum, New York, NY, U.S.A. (2012); Bohemian Nights Short Films, curated by Ingrid Dinter, Gershwin Hotel, New York, NY, U.S.A. (2012); Remix, The Samek Art Gallery, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. (2012); Remix, The Daum Museum of Art, Katonah, NY, U.S.A. (2013); Remix, Ewing Gallery of Art & Architecture, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee, U.S.A. (2013); Remix, Bates College Museum of Art, Bates College, Lewiston, Maine, U.S.A. (2014); All of Them Witches, organized by Dan Nadel and Laurie Simmons, Jeffery Deitch Gallery, Los Angeles, California, U.S.A. (2020); Graffiti, Public Access, New York, NY, U.S.A. (2022); 13 Women: Variation II, OCMA, Costa Mesa, California, U.S.A. (2023); New York is for Lovers, curated by Sophie Mörner, CF Hill, Stockholm (2023) and Baroque, Champ Lacombe, Biarritz, France (2023).

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