Very crude show with pretentious titles yet unpretentious imagery what results in a good joke.
“Transhistoric waterfall” looks like a scene set in the Peter Doig “Pelican (Stag)”. However, whilst Doig explores the possibilities of transforming an archival photograph into painting, Henneken digs inside the potential just within painting. The mesmerising picture is suggesting animated motion inside the objects such as trees changing colours like an escalator or monkey faces pulsating like jelly fish.
Moving anti-clockwise, “Kin”- Pieta composition in a stormy canyon has the psychedelic effect of 70s Chicago Imagists and Jim Woodrig’s “Visions of Frank’s” as well as it is staring at you as penetratingly as a Russian Ikon.
The next one is an unfinished landscape. “A meeting at the Desert Shore” shows a ridiculously hideous devil-sheep, with a dick hanging down, meeting some fairy; all set by the lake Garda in Sahara.
After the three daytime paintings, there’s an uninteresting nighttime work (“Space in space”) followed by another daytime painting of two imaginary figures titled “Teachings in Transfiguration”. One looks like Miyazaki’s Deer God, the other has a rainbow face that could suck you in. I love the seriousness of the names juxtaposed with silly, purely imaginary creatures.
In the end two night paintings, the last one being the first time I encountered a work that successfully incorporated a frame inside the painting. The reason is that the work is painted skilfully with an awareness of both high art history as well as folk souvenirs. It is so kitschy but at the same time self-aware and judgmental about what is depicted that it makes an overwhelmingly good, offensive, unpretentious metapainting.
Every painting is full of referential content and careful brushwork, what makes every round you take a fresh experience, euphoric and positively exhausting. Uwe Heineken takes variations on genre painting to an extreme that should make Laura Owens blush.

UWE HENNEKEN: THE TEACHINGS OF THE TRANSHISTORICAL FLAMINGO
PIPPY HOULDSWORTH

Uwe Henneken, Kin, 2017, oil on canvas,93 x 72 cm
(image from http://www.houldsworth.co.uk)

September 2017