Artist: Marc Henry

Marc Henry’s work distinguishes itself through a characteristically figurative style, drawing on elements of realism and estranging them through presented subject matters and painterly execution. Through his ominous yet playful visual language the artist explores societal shifts and transformations in relation to technological advances as well as digital image boards and their translatability into the medium of oil painting.

The concept of reality and its prerogative of interpretation in the context of our post-factual age along side digital image manipulation are of great interest for the artist. Henry works consciously with ambiguity. With their darkened colors, his works express an initial discomfort that does not want to be categorized or localized. Subject, content and color sometimes even merge to manifest a feeling that can be experienced as eeriness – an indefinite emotional topos that is partly reminiscent of the remote atmospheres in the films of the American director David Lynch. What interests the artist are subjective experiences that activate his simulated realities in a variety of ways. Narrative translation work between different visual media is more crucial than the precise translation of the content of the work by the viewer. The repeated manipulation process begins with the selection of a motif from his enormous digital archive, is followed by image processing in Photoshop and leads back to the canvas, back to Photoshop, again to the canvas, continuously in rhythmic reciprocity until a form is found. A pseudo-narrative emerges thereby, containing falsified memories of real events.

His work has been shown at Kölner Liste, MMIII Kunstverein Mönchengladbach, Schloßmuseum Murnau, Kunsthalle Oktogon and Palais Rasumofsky amongst others.