German artist born in 1974.
The exaggerated, garish colours next to darker, moody tones and a certain ironic disposition that brings together a melancholic feeling and the grotesque, enhance his oeuvre with an unexpected audacity.
Romanticism, symbolism and allusions to primitive forms.
There is something tragicomic about Henneken’s paintings and certainly something of the Grotesque in their interleaving of ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures and framing of large, resonant questions about the nature of reality in humorous, sometimes almost ridiculous, terms.
The exaggerated, garish colours next to darker, moody tones and a certain ironic disposition that brings together a melancholic feeling and the grotesque, enhance his oeuvre with an unexpected audacity.
Romanticism, symbolism and allusions to primitive forms.
An oak tree, allegory, spirituality and the Grotesque
The forest, and specifically the oak tree, has long been associated with a sense of German national identity and Heimat, from the dense woods in early German Renaissance paintings to the ubiquitous forest in tales of the Brothers Grimm and the shadowy woodland and lone oak in the allegorical paintings of the German Romantics.It's like the olive branch for the Greeks.There is something tragicomic about Henneken’s paintings and certainly something of the Grotesque in their interleaving of ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures and framing of large, resonant questions about the nature of reality in humorous, sometimes almost ridiculous, terms.
