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.