This will be Henry’s first solo exhibition in the UK.
“Beginning in the mid 1960’s a group of young Chicago sculptors began to forge a new American sculpture from the iron-tough aesthetics of Constructivism and the industrialized cerebrations of the Bauhaus. Chicago sculpture became the unique melting pot where the internationalism of European Modernism could alloy with the singular balance of populism and individualism that marked the heartland of American enterprise. John Henry emerged as the leader of this group. The fledgling sculptor’s special vision was to unlock the potential of this unique situation.
His fledgling status quickly disappeared. Within only a few years Henry had reconfigured Constructivism’s formal grammar into monumental fabrications distinguished for their melding of Abstract Expressionism into architectonic construction. Before the close of the decade of the 1960’s, this young painter had learned to translate his expressionist bolts of color – and the Abstract Expressionists’ oft-cited belief in an heroic individualism -- into beams of steel crisscrossing a prairie sky. He had dissembled the architectonic beams of the city and re-expressed these as gigantic lines of color on the canvas of that sky.
As a result of John Henry’s innovative energy, monumentality became a key ingredient in public art, in contemporary sculpture as a whole and in the debate on the role of contemporary public sculpture. Key to this debate was this sculptor’s assertion that to carry out his search for the expressive potential of scale, then entrepreneurship and community engagement would be as much a part of making his sculpture as would his wresting of steel.”
His fledgling status quickly disappeared. Within only a few years Henry had reconfigured Constructivism’s formal grammar into monumental fabrications distinguished for their melding of Abstract Expressionism into architectonic construction. Before the close of the decade of the 1960’s, this young painter had learned to translate his expressionist bolts of color – and the Abstract Expressionists’ oft-cited belief in an heroic individualism -- into beams of steel crisscrossing a prairie sky. He had dissembled the architectonic beams of the city and re-expressed these as gigantic lines of color on the canvas of that sky.
As a result of John Henry’s innovative energy, monumentality became a key ingredient in public art, in contemporary sculpture as a whole and in the debate on the role of contemporary public sculpture. Key to this debate was this sculptor’s assertion that to carry out his search for the expressive potential of scale, then entrepreneurship and community engagement would be as much a part of making his sculpture as would his wresting of steel.”
Excerpt from text by Steven Luecking, John Henry: Sculpture to be published October 2007
25 Chepstow Corner
Chepstow Place
London W2 4Xe
+44 (0)20 7229 8811
+44 (0) 7768 082249
angus@broadbentgallery.com
www.broadbentgallery.com
Tues-Sat 11-6