John Henderson

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Proof (wall rip, verso), 2015
dye sublimation on polyester

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installation view at Miart 2015

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Proof (wall rip, verso), 2015
dye sublimation on polyester

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Proof (wall rip, verso), 2015
dye sublimation on polyester

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installation view at Miart 2015

all images courtesy the artist and T293 Gallery, Roma / Naples

American artist JOHN HENDERSON (1984) has recently created a series of works entitled Proof (wall rip, verso) that he calls digital wall paintings and which depict – at first sight – pieces of linen with ripped fragments of paper or cardboard.

Actually these pieces aren’t paintings but printed works showing the backside of page-sized swatches of linen that have been previously sticked with sizing on the wall of HENDERSON‘s studio, then that have been torn off taking some layers of wall paint along with them. Eventually the pieces of linen are documented at high resolution, enlarged, printed using a technique that transfers dye directly into the fibers of polyester fabric, and then stretched.

This body of work along with the series Type (2015) – created using the chemical process of electrotyping – were presented at the Milanese art fair Miart last week by the Italian gallery T293.

Everything that usually serves representation and illusion is left to serve nothing but itself, that is abstraction; while everything that usually serves the abstract or decorative – flatness, bare outlines, all-over or symmetrical design – is put to the service of representation. And the more explicit this contradiction is made, the more effective in every sense the picture tends to be. – CLEMENT GREENBERG, from The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969



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