Anton Henning: pink period

Abstract

"Tim Van Laere Gallery is pleased to present Pink Period, the third solo exhibition by Anton Henning. Few colors trigger as many contradictory associations and emotions or have as many symbolic meanings in both high as low culture as pink. The same tension and duality can also be found in the works by Anton Henning. If we consider art history as an ongoing conversation, Anton Henning (°1964 Berlin, lives and works in Berlin and Manker) proves himself to be a master conversationalist who speaks various different languages. His oeuvre comprises paintings, sculptures, drawings, films, photographs, musical pieces and entire environments. His oeuvre could be read as a contemporary interpretation of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Focussing equally on the search as well as the outcome, he creates a hybrid pictorial event, an anarchy of images liberated from the gravity of the isms in art history. With his motif repertory, material choices, stylistic devices and playful reinventions of the genre types, Henning doesn't simply quote from art history, but he playfully looks for painterly potential through his own pictorial memory which has remained delitescent, discarding all spatial, temporal, and ideational contexts. He moves between modern enthusiasm and postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naiveté and knowledge, empathy and apathy, unity and diversity, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity."-- Provided by publisher.