ANTON 

HENNING

*1964 in Berlin – lives in Manker, Brandenburg

Born in 1964 and raised in West Berlin, he is a German artist who, in addition to painting, also works with sculpture and film. Henning is self-taught. In 1985 he spent a long time in London and New York. His first solo exhibitions followed only three years later. Anton Henning’s work has been shown in numerous solo exhibitions at international institutions and museums, including the Museum of Art Lucerne; Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt a. Main; Arp Museum, Remagen; S.M.A.K., Gent; Wilhelm-Hack Museum, Ludwigshafen; Kunsthalle Mannheim.
His works are represented in international public and private collections.

Anton Henning is the master of contradiction, an omnivore whose apparently insatiable appetite is especially for modernism. In doing so, he devotes himself again and again to positions of art history, plays with them, uses them, expands them. The position he adopts is neither historically correct nor objective, nor – typical of postmodernism – are they quotations and certainly not appropriations; rather, Henning’s works are revisions.

He modifies and comments on modernist styles with the claim of subjecting them to an overall update. This approach is explicitly processual; as little art is ever completely outdated, as little is it ever complete. In his room-sized productions, he uses paintings, sculptures and furniture to combine the design for a more beautiful home with the futility of the idea and the future in a composition tailored to the rooms with a good pinch of romantic irony. They are a multi-layered, intelligent-sensual demonstration of the autopoietic system developed by the artist since the early nineties and constantly condensing; the permanent expansion and concentration of a web of isms referring to itself and modernity and its missed possibilities (due to dogmas).

For all their thoughtfulness, the works exhibited in Interieurs radiate an almost disturbingly self-evident lightness. Anton Henning’s work to date, which has been published in many publications, is a challenge and inspiration for an entire younger generation of painters.