ANTON HENNING
2016-04-04In his interiors or installations, Henning sets out a “metalinguistic” reflection on his artistic language that ironizes the presentation of works in a museum space, questioning his own vision of art, the boundaries between representation and reality, and the voyeuristic role of the artist-spectator. His creative work embraces painting, sculpture, photography, video, drawing, music and design in spaces conceived as complete artistic environments (Gesamtkunstwerk) that offer the visitor a pleasurable experience. But through his technical control we meet layers of meaning and indirect reference to other artists such as Courbet, Picasso, Duchamp, Arp or Henry Moore. He dismantles the history of art up to the present day in order to reconstruct it completely in a new form of artistic synthesis, easily and naturally combining styles traditionally considered antagonistic.
If Matisse’s masterpieces show ambiguity about representation and decoration, Anton Henning takes this contrast between the figurative and the abstract to the limit by adopting an ironic distance with respect to his own work that allows him to paraphrase characteristic motifs and elements of other painters—such as Matisse’s decoration or Picabia’s nudes—with virtuosity and a sense of humour. The categories in which he classifies his works—portraits, interiors, still lifes, landscapes—are witty misdirections; he plays with traditional genres, giving a reading and treatment of form that not onlyshows awareness of postmodernism but goes far beyond it, contemplating the past ironically and knowingly.
Opposite – Portrait No. 444, 2015
Exhibition runs through till April 21st, 2016
Galeria Javier Lopez & Fer Francés
Guecho, 12 B
28023 Madrid
Spain
