Unique Library Showcases Hundreds of Paintbrushes

French artist Camille Henrot has turned a simple studio wall into a sprawling archive of paintbrushes, a collection that now fills the space of her New York workspace.

How a pandemic‑era routine sparked a brush library

Henrot, whose practice spans film, sculpture, painting and performance, relies on daily drawing as the core of her creative process. During the COVID‑19 lockdown she lost her studio and juggled caring for a small child, leaving little uninterrupted time for sketching. “It was a very difficult time,” she said, noting that the constant interruptions prevented her from entering the flow needed for gestural work.

To compensate, she began cataloguing the characteristics of each brush—speed, rigidity, flexibility—so she could recall the right tool without trial and error. The result is a “palette of graphic possibilities” displayed on the walls, where delicate feathers sit beside densely packed paddles and whiskery fans.

Henrot’s collection includes brushes bought on trips to Asia. In Korea she prefers synthetic‑centred brushes for their flexibility, despite their reputation as “less fancy.”

A visit to Japan introduced her to a shop curated by Shino Nomura, where she encountered brushes made from pheasant, chicken, peacock, raccoon, goat, squirrel, horse and even cat hair.

She also modifies tools herself, trimming bristles or repurposing a brush hardened by an accidental glue spill, which she found produced an “interesting line.”

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Such adaptations reflect her broader interest in the tension between analog and digital methods, and the challenge of solving “perplexing problems” through material experimentation.

When a broken arm in 2021 left her unable to draw conventionally, Henrot digitised her binder of brushstroke swatches. The images—produced as both positive and negative vinyl stickers—became a “strangely uncanny surface of cuts, scrapes and vector graphics,” resembling a crowded computer screen.

This digital layer later served as a mask in a new commission for the Anna Polke Foundation, allowing her to blend screen‑print slickness with hand‑made gestural marks.

She continues to experiment.

In the broader context of contemporary art, this tactile archive reveals a growing fascination with material specificity. While many artists rely on digital tools, Henrot’s approach shows how physical objects can still shape visual language, offering a tangible counterpoint to purely virtual workflows.