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1976
(FRANCE)
BRITISH
Tom Henderson creates reductive, geometric image-objects that exist at a liminal intersection between painting and sculpture. Born in the UK, Henderson currently lives and works in Provence, in the South of France.
After studying with renowned ceramicist Gordon Baldwin at Eton College, Henderson earned his BFA in Fine Art with an emphasis in sculpture from University of Newcastle upon Tyne in 1998.
The simplest reading of Henderson’s work is that he is a painter with the sensibility of a sculptor and that his works are hung flat on a wall. His works are never fully flat, however, and they are more architectonic than pictorial. Their three-dimensional presence activates the surrounding spaces, demanding mobility from the viewer to fully experience the work. Henderson incorporates a wide range of mediums into his practice, centering on commercial materials such as cast acrylic, aluminum, spray paint, and automotive paint. The sleek, vivid, industrial presence of such materials instantly evokes the legacy of Minimalist artists like Donald Judd. However, unlike Minimalists who hid the hand and personality of the artist in favour of creating an impersonal material statement of reduction and form, Henderson enthusiastically makes work that instigates personal connections with viewers.
Henderson is interested in the ways light, depth and movement can create evolving perceptual experiences for viewers. His acrylic and aluminum surfaces change in nuanced ways as the lighting changes, or as the viewer moves around. He purposefully mobilizes texture, form, and color in ways that trick the eye into an initial two-dimensional reading of the work. As the viewer spends more time with it, the work metamorphoses into less of an image, and more of a three-dimensional actuator of space and light. He is not creating self-referential abstractions that end with the work but is rather materializing conditions in which a viewer might interact with forms, color, light, space and materials in personal and unexpected ways.
“Even though my work is clearly rooted in the minimalist and optical works of the 1960’s and 70’s, I believe there is still much to explore in the nature of perception. The conversation between reduced forms, diverse materials and the physical and visual experience is, for me, as relevant as ever in today’s hyper-digital world. Unlike classic minimalism, which rejected external reference in order to represent only itself, I create works that are the nexus of a system of conditions in continual dynamic interaction. My works enact rather than represent an experience.”
Henderson has exhibited extensively throughout Europe and the UK, with selected exhibitions in the US and Mexico. Recent exhibitions include The Observance Chapel, Draguignan, France; Château Thuerry, Provence, France; Bethlehem Kirche, Meerbusch, Germany; and Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Tamaulipas, Mexico City.
Galerie Dukto, Paris
