calendario eventi  :: 

X

3/3/2011

Henning Kles

Wendt+Friedmann Galerie, Berlin

An upright skeleton pokes around in the ground with a pole. A figure dressed in black kicks a crawling person, while four others look on. A group of eight masked characters are shown from behind as they stand in front of a large source of light – the lettering on their hooded jackets indicates that they are a gang. Grotesque figures that look like they are from a chamber of horrors. The characteristic curved bay windows of the luxury Atlantic Hotel in Hamburg mutate into the stern of the Titanic with a tattered flag against a dark night sky.

The new set of works that the Hamburg artist Henning Kles (born 1970) has been working on since the start of 2009 refers back to his earlier paintings in terms of the choice of motifs. Real and cinematic dystopias are the subject matter of these new paintings. Henning Kles draws on classic expressionist films such as "Nosferatu" or doomsday films such as the "Soylent Green" (1973) as sources. More recently, he has also been informed by the elaborate silhouette animation films of Lotte Reininger (1899-1981), which were particularly influential in terms of style in the 1920s.

Initially, his new paintings look more like graphic prints. However, every painting is actually a laboriously produced unique piece. In his generally medium-scale to small-scale paintings, Henning Kles uses a black bitumen emulsion, a material not typically used in art and which is actually employed in the construction industry. Medium-thickness painters' cardboard serves as a medium, which is then covered with this viscous liquid material. The painting surface is covered using masking tape, and a sketch is drawn here. A cutting knife is then used to remove parts of the surface in a number of steps. In this process, Kles has to make artistic decisions similar to those that arise when working on etchings, woodcuts or lithography. Finally, the paint is carefully removed using wood turpentine. In this way, a subtractive process results in the finished painting with varying dark brown, ochre and black tones. With their reduction to contrasts between bright and dark, Kles‘ new works initially look as if they have been cut out using a scissors. At the same time, however, they are surrounded by a smoky, toxic sfumato: remnants of paint, drops of turpentine and other hazes all combine to create diffuse effects.

Alongside sources of inspiration from cinema, Henning Kles also frequently draws upon a large stock of media images from magazines, newspaper and advertising material. These could be photos of riots or catastrophes, or, for example, an image of dead cattle, in whose bizarrely tied-up legs the painter manages to discover abstract elements.

Old art catalogues with Chinese sculptures or photographic reproductions of Roman portraits also add to the artist's ever-growing stock of images. However, this apparently random collection still has to pass through a selective filter system before it is used in Kles‘ paintings. On this matter, Henning Kles himself says: "All of the source material that I use – regardless of whether from film stills or newspaper cuttings – is steeped with meaning, so I first have to process it and extract it from its context so that it can then be rearranged in a new way on canvas, presented on a new, unused stage and viewed in a liberated manner. Only then are new associations possible." (1)

Henning Kles has compressed his new paintings into very varied, frieze- like or tableau-like ensembles for exhibition purposes. In the viewer's imagination, this method of presentation results in a variety of narrative strands, which are however in no way explicitly prescribed by Kles. As with a loosely arranged strip cartoon or comic- like narration, the paintings draw the viewer into an associative maelstrom of the ironic-grotesque and of the suggestive and uncanny. Taking a direct cue from Sigmund Freud's 1919 essay "Das Unheimliche (The Uncanny)", Kles draws on literary masters of subliminal, menacing atmospheres such as E.T.A. Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe or Franz Kafka. There is also no mistaking the closeness in terms of motifs to various underground music genres. A vigorous aesthetic debate on the fantastic, grotesque, ugly and evil has taken place in recent years. This debate reveals a widespread and, ultimately, anti-modernist fascination with certain aspects of all things scary as a playful counterpoint to the increasingly sleek and stylish corporate world of major corporations, banks, television channels and publishing houses. What is beautiful? What is ugly? "Ask the devil", was Voltaire's response, "He will tell you that beauty is a pair of horns, four claws and a tail." (2)

Henning Kles‘ paintings in this new group of works, which has yet to be titled, operate on the interface between laconic everyday and media observation and the artistic realisation of dark individual and collective fantasies and premonitions, underfed in terms of motifs by a forsaken world of the uncanny. With their systematic, expressive implementation as regards paint and technique, these paintings have the character of a series which is coherent in terms of form and content and is also nowhere near being finished.

Nicole Büsing and Heiko Klaas 2010

(1) Henning Kles from a conversation with Michael Diers, in: Henning Kles: Sliver Surfer, Publisher: Bielefelder Kunstverein, Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg, 2006, p. 52

(2) From: Umberto Eco: Die Geschichte der Hässlichkeit (German translation of "On Ugliness"), Carl Hanser Verlag München, 2007, p. 12

Opening Friday March 4, 2011, 6-9 pm

WENDT+FRIEDMANN
Heidestrasse 54, 10557 Berlin
Hours: Wed-Fri 12-6 pm
Free admission

stampa

permanent link