Henry Anno
In Henry Anno’s work, no material is arbitrary; every surface has a texture, every texture a history. For Anno – who worked in the fashion industry for many years before turning to art in the early 2000s – therefore, there is no such thing as a blank canvas or a clean slate. Rather every ground component is already the bearer of particular signification. Where did it come from? How did it get here? From such a starting point, any material makes as self-evident a base for an art work: from old doors, bed sheets, a chainsaw, Anno finds potential in anything.
In his early work, he applies his interest in materiality and consumer culture to comment on globalised networks of trade. Although everything we have around us was, at least once, inside a big shipping container, we rarely pay attention to their exterior. Anno captured their surprising idiosyncrasies in a group of large photographs from YEAR. Suddenly apparent are the differences in colour and font design, while the almost true-to-life size of the works for a moment tricks the viewer, like a post-industrial trompe l’oeil, into believing that they’re three-dimensional.
And given the sporadic nature of Anno’s practice, they may well have been actual container fronts. For a subsequent suite of works, Blood Flags (YEAR), he employed heavy-duty fibreglass plates, originally used to board up windows of properties along the Rhine river to protect them during high tides. On these, he painted a total of five flags – USA, Israel, the Soviet Union, China and Switzerland – chosen, not for any political or historical reason, but for the presence on each of them of a star or a cross. These symbols are always red, while the other colours are muted and strictly decorative. Inspired by pop art, here, Anno leaves viewers to speculate what happens when political tropes become graphic icons. Is it possible for them to carry any stable or inherent meaning?
Related questions are at stake in Anno’s on-going and diverse use of the tarpaulin cloth he gathered from the old radar station on Berlin’s Teufelsberg. Standing on top of a hill made of the rubble from Germany’s bombed out capital after the war, the radar station was used by the US army until the fall of the wall. Ironic, given this epic story, Anno named the series of monochrome tar paintings he made from the material Silence. But this incongruence, in fact, speaks volumes of how we talk about, build upon, and move on from the mars of history. Whatever Anno paints on the Teufelsberg cloth, the history of the cold war and his own childhood memories of growing up in West Berlin, are always there in the background.
These works are all emblematic of Anno’s practice in their eccentricity and reliance on chance and intuition. Many more fill up his archives: surrealist assemblages of disparate objects – an axe, a plastic shovel, a toy church, for instance, in Childhood (YEAR) – are often both eerie and funny, while, in a recent turn to figurative painting, Anno lovingly satirises the art world in a colourful band of caricatures. (His Collector has the solemn face of a more well-dressed Angela Merkel). Common to all is their boldness and sense of humour. There is nothing, it seems, that Henry Anno won’t try once.
