John Henderson

About

John Henderson forges an unlikely alliance between industrial production and gestural painting. Using expressive brushstrokes as evidence of the artist's touch, he creates allover paintings, which he then has cast in aluminum or bronze at a foundry. Merging traces of industrial and painterly production, the resulting works occupy a shifting middle ground between artwork and object, painting and sculpture, the mass produced and the unique, the functional and the decorative—even between horizontality and verticality. These identities are variously tested in this exhibition, most explicitly in the work Three Taborets. With the simple but significant gesture of moving works from his ongoing series of casts off the vertical wall and onto a horizontal surface, Henderson requires the viewer to consider them as painting and sculpture, furniture and artwork. The oil paintings, also on view here, provide a more traditional counterpoint to the critical framework of the casts. With their careful brushwork and composition they stand in marked contrast to the metal surrogate paintings. The placement of these works in the space further underscores Henderson's interest in the relational aspects of his artistic expression.

Henderson received his MFA in art theory and practice from Northwestern University in 2009, and his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007.