The Crack in the Bowl

One thing I always appreciate in other people is when they don’t take themselves too seriously. And since this week I’ve been posting a few examples of work with elements of humor and playful vibes, today I wanted to share a few impressions of Henriette Grahnert solo at Galerie Kleindienst in Leipzig.

Over the last couple of years of visiting the gallery or seeing their art fair presentations, I’ve grown into a big fan of the Dresden-based artist. The fact that her work is (at least at first) not easy to recognize instantly is the quality that first intrigued me. Working w collage, drawing, and painting, through simple, one-object compositions or by revisiting more complex tropes, the work tends to vary in form and approach. But the thing that is constant is that it’s not taking things too seriously and is nonchalantly ironic about painterly conventions.

And looking at the current exhibition, which revolves around the good ol subject of still life, one can see how the work is referential, how it blends abstraction and representation, technique and depiction, humor and art-historical dialogue (or however you wanna call the way we’ve learned to talk about art). To achieve that, Granhert uses painting as a toolbox. She’s not relying on one way of doing things but is wielding different tools to create distinct elements. By doing so, she points at artistic trends or clichés w a tongue-in-cheek attitude through a well-balanced mix of painterly skill and conceptual antics. The term that came to mind while looking at these is “deconstructed decoration,” as many elements could be imagined in the context of an (overused) fine art tradition, or even your standard poster or postcard. But Granhert deconstructs and reassembles those into a new concept and image, one that feels sincere, humorous, covertly skilled, and resolutely imperfect (hence The Crack in the Bowl). —Saša Bogojev