Kathleen Henderson–Bruised Fruit

Kathleen Henderson, Pipersville, Oil stick on paper, 26 x 40 in., 2024

Anglim/Trimble is pleased to present our latest exhibition Bruised Fruit by Kathleen Henderson.

Exhausted by the relentless unraveling of the American body politic over the past eight years, Kathleen Henderson’s new works in Bruised Fruit are born out of a sense of fraying, exposure to new levels of absurdity, plunging levels of discourse, and the normalization of political violence.

Henderson feels psychically bruised, but she is also darkly amused – the works are funny. Humor functions as her defense mechanism, an act of survival. Henderson’s goal is to keep going, to keep finding ways to laugh, dance and be in community with others. In Henderson’s words, “the world is ending so don’t be late!”

Kathleen Henderson, Shaft, Oil stick on paper, 26 x 40 in., 2024

Why pineapples? Why shoes?

Pineapples are the perfect feature fruit, signaling wealth and hospitality, and at the same time, historic and deplorable land grabs. Still, Henderson finds them to be the most comical of fruits (except of course for the banana).

Shoes function as a powerful metaphor. To be in another person’s shoes, implies seeing something from another’s perspective. Empty shoes connote death and loss, and yet they are as common as the dirt on which we tread.

Kathleen Henderson, Pernambuco, Oil stick on paper, 26 x 40 in., 2024

Henderson’s rounded, drooping, slumping figures stare out from amongst the shoes and fruits, as if to say, “See us, we are you.” Grounded and dirty, they sit or stand on the earth, dust made vital, mud beings whose origins are only too obvious. We can feel the pull of gravity on these figures, but even in their distorted forms, we can feel their humanity.

Please join us for a reception on Saturday, November 2 from 4-6 pm in our second-floor gallery at Minnesota Street Project.

Bruised Fruit is on view through Saturday, December 21.

Bluebeard and Other Poolings, exhibit at Track 16, Los Angeles

TRACK 16
in the Bendix Building, 1206 Maple Ave, #1005, Los Angeles, CA 90015
310-815-8080
www.track16.com

May 14 to July 2, 2022
Public reception: Saturday, May 14 from 6-9pm

Artist Kathleen Henderson’s new exhibition, “Bluebeard and Other Poolings” peers through the looking glass to explore the inner lives of humanity calculating an impending apocalypse. For twenty years Henderson has fashioned blob-like ghosts and beings to expose narcissism, vanity, and feelings of powerlessness in the face of mounting challenges that threaten society and existence itself. Animated in oil stick on paper, her figures assemble in an array of poses that reveal our inability as a collective to gather behind solutions, instead choosing to cheer on chaos or focus on how photogenic we’ll appear in insurrection selfies.

Henderson freely acknowledges the influence of the January 6th insurrection on her current series, and much of her work depicts our brutality and insistence of passing on destructive traditions. Throughout the exhibit, her characters run amok, and hint at the growing radicalism that is infecting every aspect of our society, accumulating not just onlookers but active participants. Bluebearded figures, the personification of murdering misogynists, make multiple appearances including parading their way onto a school board, presumably to ban books and purge curricula. No image more directly addresses the characteristics of crowd mentality than Procession, which eerily mirrors the political pageantry of our former president and his minions on their march to disassemble democracy and establish an exclusionary society.

Many of Henderson’s drawings in the exhibition derive from her self-described “doomsday residency” at 18th Street Art Center in Santa Monica which bridged her experience not just during the pandemic, but also through the attempted coup. There, in her month-long solitude, Henderson drew on a daily basis, with news radio filling the space of her studio and imbuing her drawings with a sense of timeliness and urgency behind our societal collapse.

Henderson explains, “Facing the loss of the natural world, there is no time for despair. If you’re despairing, you need to get over it. I hope that these drawings address our singular ineptitude and the necessity to work together as a collective instead of as a collection of individuals.”

The urgency of her greasy lines and the palpable immediacy of her beings build scenes that disturb us with cutting humor. Experiencing her drawings is to hold hands with her while laughing and crying through the pinnacle of fright in a haunted house. Her cartoonish lampooning is a portal to engagement. Henderson remarks, “There's truth in line, there's truth in the details, and there's truth in scale. Tragedy is everywhere but to make it look like comedy, it stops the clock, and opens a small space allowing us to begin contemplating the unimaginable." As critical of her subjects as Henderson can be, there’s also universality – something of self-portraiture in them. We all have weakness, folly, and base desire.

Donald Kuspit, writing in Artforum, explains, "Folly is an old god, celebrated by Erasmus. Stoic comedy is not a bad response to a feeling of meaninglessness; indeed, to laugh at the acedia that art and life seem to have become is self preserving. Humour is the last saving grace – the only way of avoiding self-deception.”

Kathleen Henderson, Artist Talk, Track 16 Gallery, January 30, 2020

Kathleen Henderson Drawings - Gallery Paule Anglim

Kathleen Henderson, "Head of Train.", 2011, Oil stick on paper, 27" x 22" 

Gallery Paule Anglim is pleased to announce an exhibition of new drawings by Kathleen Henderson.

The exhibition will feature recent oil stick works on paper that play within an orchestrated associative context. Implying a narrative voice recounting a story or point of view, the drawings describe thought processes that seem both absurdly personal and capable of weightier relevance. Henderson's method of drawing pays homage to the greater range of cartoon drawing, from the political satire to the comic book variety. Creating an experience more common in literature, she layers intimacy (psychology) with more profound themes (history.)

Kathleen Henderson is presenting other new work at Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Los Angeles May 26th - June 30th. The exhibition Notes on a Gathering Crowd, will feature a large group of new oil stick on paper drawings.

Kathleen Henderson lives and maintains her studio in Berkeley. She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Boston University and her MFA from Queens College, New York. In 2008 her solo exhibition "What if I could Draw a Bird That Could Change the World" was mounted at the Drawing Center in New York.

You may visit the gallery's web site for more information: www.gallerypauleanglim.com

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Notes on a gathering Crowd-Rosamund Felsen Gallery

Henderson-Poster

Notes on a gathering Crowd: Rosamund Felsen Gallery

2525 Michigan Ave, Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, CA

May 26th -June 30th -Opening Reception may 26th 5-7pm

Irresistible Empire June Show

Kathleen Henderson
Rosamund Felsen gallery press release
Irresistible Empire
June 5, 2010 — July 3, 2010
Reception: Saturday June 5th, 5-7 pm

Through a finely developed compositional acuity and a singular, fully-loaded line quality, Henderson manages to re-focus frames of human folly culled from the everyday and the eternal. Her anonymous, yet achingly-familiar characters cavort and cringe, sometimes through complex, cluttered landscapes, but more often in a theatrical void. Personal and political scandal, current and ancient wars, battles horrific and banal, all blend with a background of children’s fairy tales and ancient myths. Religious doctrine and ritual swirl menacingly around exquisite and uncanny likenesses. With these new oil stick drawings, figures are finding themselves shadowed by stains and smudges, visually abstracted and isolated even as they, “ begin to function as a narrative element in themselves,” as Henderson herself suggests. Slashes of color offer what may be redemption, or futile repentance. A small group of sculptures seems to have sprung fully formed from this new set of drawings. Henderson’s use of paper pulp, tar and tinted wax present an organic extension of her gestural narratives. The ship is listing perilously and the oily waters are rising and there is room in the lifeboats for only the rats. Irresistible Empire Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Santa Monica june 5th- July 3rd OPP