Resisting conventional disciplines in art, Henning is an artist who covers a lot of ground, and so much of it is self-referential.
His art knows no limits; it is playful, ironical, light-footed yet profound, while always maintaining contact with art history. By executing every technique and discipline, including painting, drawing, photography, video, collage, sculpture and installations, Henning’s work proposes a radical revision of the boundaries which we position around a work of art.
The exhibition will feature Henning’s recent paintings, sculptures, stained glasses, furniture, carpet and video works. In this site-specific installation especially prepared for the gallery, Henning not only intricately mapped out his works, framed them, lighted them, and chose the surrounding wall colors but also equipped Galerist with custom carpeting and stained glasses with special lighting.
Henning is anti-unconventional in his examination of traditional art genres (including portraits, landscapes, nudes and still life, in which he often blurs the boundaries between genres) and his work frequently includes mixing and sampling the work of other artists with a sense of humor and self-awareness that does not conform to contemporary expectations or fashions. His diverse subjects and styles, from the abstract to the figurative, from pin-up girls to interiors, are plundered knowingly and ironically from art history and popular culture.
Reflecting his unconventional ways to his personal life, Henning dropped out of art school, opting instead to train himself.
After dropping out of art school, Henning not only learned to paint but before long began to sculpt, record videos, design environments, and make music.
The surreal technique that he uses reflects in any given canvas, Henning switches between styles to produce paintings reflecting his style and places them in carefully constructed wooden frames with built-in diffuse lighting. His comfortable furniture, non-representational bronze sculptures, portraits, still lives with symbolism in the spirit of the 17th century and abstract formats placed in his installations are the interpretations of old masters.
As explained in Wolfgang Ullrich’s writing, by violating established patterns and expectations of taste, Henning displays complete freedom, combines figurative and abstract painting and doesn’t subjugate himself to a standard, an ideology, a style or an ideal of taste.
“Anton Henning’s subtle violations of the rules convey a notion of what it means to posses a good taste of bad taste or a ‘taste for the tasteless,’” Ullrich said. “Bad painting is also something very elitist. Self-reflexive taste is needed not just to create according to products but also to be able to deal with them. However, rude and purportedly archaic bad painting may appear at first glance, all the more does it presuppose a culture sufficiently elaborated to be able to transcend and disclaim its own self.”
According to Ullrich, only somebody confident of the security of his position “can afford to do without that which belongs to good taste, without forms of undisrupted beauty, and instead take delight in ironic, provocative and absurd special forms of the aesthetic.”
It is precisely expressed by Thomas Wagner in his writing; Henning draws on many sources and treat the spirits he invokes by encountering them with irony, possibly with Romantic irony. He romanticizes something by giving to “what is commonplace a lofty meaning, to what is conventional a recondite appearance, to what is familiar the dignity of the unfamiliar, the finite the appearance of infinity.” Henning is both a Romantic and its opposite. He collects his art from fragments and prescribes loosening up exercises in every place.” When he realizes that there can be no escape from this vicious circle, abstract or figurative images of life, Henning simply tightens the screw a few turns and “he encounters distance with even more detachment, irony with irony. Like Duchamp, he too, has become a meta-ironist.”