Henning Bohl

Painter Henning Bohl continually questions the methods for producing and exhibiting artworks. For Bohl, exhibition environments, including the way artworks are made, installed, and displayed, become self-imposed situations that demand a specific form of observation. He is interested in the idea of dramatizing these pieces in different formal arrangements that are engaging and performative. By uniquely dividing and creating different areas of space in the gallery, Bohl navigates a path and outlines sceneries for the viewer.

For instance, his 2009 exhibition at Casey Kaplan Gallery in New York featured large canvases resting on sheetrock tables or hinged to the walls of the gallery like staged partitions. To create the works, Bohl drew shapes with scissors and pasted them directly to the surface; elements such as sickles, tears, and circles are formed from rolls of colored window display paper and applied onto primed canvases. Sections are left curling up into tubular rolls, enhancing air bubbles, wrinkles, and ruptures that artificially evoke the clammy peeling of wallpaper posters in a subway station or the lifting of the curtain shortly before a play. Although his works still function as paintings, the artist chose to present them as sculptural objects. Bohl alters the standards of presentation by supporting the canvases with tables made from cornices created for a previous exhibition. These architectural fragments consist of serrated sheetrock haunches, presented upside down on pairs of wooden trestles. While originally, Bohl hung canvases from these cornices, his new works rested on top of the cornice’s fragments.

Bohl has had solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Hamburg, Oldenburger Kunstverein, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Kunstverein Braunschweig and Kunstverein Frankfurt. His work has been included in group exhibitions at Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna, Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Seattle Art Museum, and Kunstverein Hannover, among other institutions.

Courtesy of Casey Kaplan