The complex, many-sided spatio-pictorial compositions of Anton Henning (b. 1964, lives in Berlin and Manker, Germany), e.g. his Lounges and Interiors, have caused a stir in large parts of Germany, at Art Basel, and at the De Pont Foundation (Tilburg/Holland) last year. In these walk-in pictures Henning pushes his predilection for rich, candy colors, decorative wall painting and fluffy carpets to the limits of the bearable. In addition, by hanging his pictures in these rooms he not only transcends the transcendence of the white cube that paint and other materials have already effected; he simultaneously reaffirms the rooms as art-defining, art-engendering sites. A similarly subversive interplay of pictorial levels and levels of perception is found in his paintings of interiors. Like their three-dimensional counterparts they, too, are a hallmark of his pictorial macrocosm. What fascinates one about Henning’s walk-in lounges is their confounded picture-hall-of-mirrors character, and their ability to whisk the viewer away into their otherwise shut, illusory picture space, a bit like Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz.

His first solo exhibition in a Swiss museum directs attention at Anton Henning as painter. In six central rooms of the Museum of Art Lucerne, known for its extremely subtle interior design as the white cube par excellence, some thirty paintings, watercolors and numerous drawings from the past two years will be on show. The exhibition of predominantly new works will afford a glimpse of Anton Henning’s vast creative and painterly potential for the first time, a selection from all groups of paintings—compactly exemplified by the painted interiors—illustrating the interwoven, serial nature of an oeuvre both strategic and playful. The intense juxtaposition of interiors, still-lifes, landscapes, pin-ups and the illusionistic abstract interiors reflects the artist’s bold – not to say blunt – inquiry into current interpretations of concepts like seriality, mimesis, ornament and motif. Precisely by rendering it impossible to pigeon-hole his œuvre, Henning leads the viewer to a zero point where all categories cease to hold and the borderland between painterly success and washout is deliberately walked. Despite – or precisely because of – the alluring and impartial nature of his pictures, we are confronted sooner or later with the uncomfortable question Sowhatsitallaboutthen? (everything). Henning’s liberal and superficial-seeming, genius-appropriating treatment of our collective pictorial memory’s finest found pieces simultaneously vexes and polarizes in painting that, because it is unpretentious and direct, can also be quite beautiful and – quite sexy.