Zach Feuer Gallery is pleased to present Ferien
vom
Du!/Abstract Masterpaintings, the gallery's third exhibition of work
by
German artist Anton Henning, featuring recent paintings, collages and
video.
Henning's work, in its scope and variety, can
be
interpreted as a series of related riddles. The work's
contradictions,
oppositions and discrepancies reveal both the absurdist and traditional
veins
in his work. Henning is anti-unconventional in his examination
of
traditional art genres (including portrait, landscape, nude and still life,
in
which he often blurs the boundaries between the genres) and his work
frequently
includes mixing and sampling the work of other artists, with humor
and
self-awareness that does not conform to contemporary expectations or
fashions.
Playing upon ideas of antidote, antonym and
antipode,
Henning's work is suffused in wit and irony, although not the one-line
irony
often found in contemporary art. "My irony is romantic"
states
Henning. It is a kind of romantic irony filled with a literary
self-consciousness in which the artist signals his freedom
from
the limits of a given work by "puncturing its fictional illusion and
exposing
its process of composition as a matter of authorial whim."
Anton Henning was born in 1964 and lives
and
works in Manker, Germany. He has exhibited widely throughout Europe, and
his
work is included in many important museum and private collections.
His
work was recently the focus of solo exhibitions at Gemeente Museum, Den
Haag;
S.M.A.K. Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst Ghent, Arp Museum, Remagen;
Museum
für Moderne Kunst (MMK), Frankfurt; Museum Haus Esters, Krefeld and
MARTa
Herford. In 2009, solo shows of his work were featured at
the
Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen; Kunsthalle Mannheim; Haus am Waldsee, Berlin;
Georg-Kolbe Museum, Berlin and the
Museum
De Pont, Tilburg.
