As part of Mikołaj Sobczak’s solo exhibition, we are pleased to present a series of videos engaging in dialogue with his practice, including a collaborative video with Colette Lumière. The video documents the final evening the two artists spent together during their residency at la cite Paris in 2024.
Colette Lumière is a pioneering artist whose expansive body of work has spanned street art, installation, performance, mixed media, staged photography, and painting since the early 1970s. A key figure in the New York art scene, her influence extends across generations of artists and musicians, including Cindy Sherman and Madonna. Renowned for her fluid movement between public and private spaces, Colette’s art boldly challenges conventional gender roles, embracing unapologetic eroticism and femininity.
Throughout her career, she has performed under a variety of personas—such as Justine, Mata Hari, and the Countess Reichenbach—exploring themes of identity, the body, and representation. Her Immersive soft fabric environments in which she often performed sleeping, in elaborate costumes (including a notorious staging of her own death at the Whitney Museum) remain a great inspiration. Colette describes her approach as “post-conceptual,” emphasizing a unity of body, mind, and soul, prioritizing emotional and sensory experience over intellectual abstraction.
Alongside the collaborative video, we also present one of Colette Lumière’s iconic works: Justine and the Boys: Notes on Baroque Living, A Historical Hysterical Tape or Too Much is Not Enough. Colette Lumière’s 1979 video is a provocative and tongue-in-cheek exploration of power, sexuality and the art world’s gender dynamics. Filmed as a last-minute spontaneous response to her impending eviction, the video features a young Colette, naked in a bubble bath, engaged in conversation with her then-boyfriend Jeff Koons, who, at the time, also worked on Wall Street. As they wait for “the boys” to arrive, Jeff eventually leaves to head to the office.
What unfolds next is a chaotic social gathering of male artists, a harem of sorts, led by Colette’s then Living Persona Justine. Among the cast is Richard Prince, who plays the “husband” who comes home to find his wife entertaining other male artists from “the downtown scene”. Later, the late critic and author Alan Jones makes an appearance as himself, reenacting a television broadcast from CBS News the night before, a house tour of wealthy housewives, led by Barbara Guggenheim.
The video lays bare the commodification of both art and artist. Through exaggerated performances, loud disco music, and fragmented dialogue, Colette (then aka Justine, frontwoman of the Colette is Dead Company and lead singer of the Victorian Punks) uses humor to highlight the fissures within the art market. Simultaneously a document of her legendary living environment and a snapshot of a particular moment in art history, Justine and the Boys is now viewed as a clear feminist statement: a female art star daring to have her own harem.