Jan Henderikse - Untitled - Sold

Jan Henderikse
Untitled
2024
Multiple
40 x 27 x 8.5 cm
edition 2/11

Jan Henderikse (Delft, January 22, 1937) is a Dutch visual artist and is regarded as the founder of the Dutch Informal Group.

Henderikse was educated at the Vrije Academie in The Hague, but left the Netherlands as early as the late 1950s. Henderikse lived and worked successively in Cologne, Düsseldorf, Curaçao, Antwerp, and New York. Today, he works and lives in Brooklyn, New York, and in Antwerp.

Biography
Together with Armando, Jan Schoonhoven, and Henk Peeters, Henderikse formed the Dutch Zero Movement in 1960. Of this group, Jan Henderikse was the one who worked with industrial products, pronounced waste, and discarded materials, using them to create assemblages. He was not the man of the theory of the Zero, but of doing and making; Henderikse saw himself as the artist with the lowest 'Zero content'. Central to the work of the group of Zero artists was the emphasis on the impersonal in art, the objective. This included avoiding a personal style and seeking production procedures that possessed an external regularity and order, comparable to the production process within factories and businesses. This manifested itself in the use of materials that were very unusual for the art of that time, such as pennies and corks (Henderikse), cotton wool and feathers (Peeters), cardboard (Schoonhoven), and bolts and barbed wire (Armando).

Work
His work was not as pure and white as that of the other members, and Henderikse's preference for waste (old corks, empty packaging) and 'rejects' (rejected photographs from laboratories, advertising posters, etc.) meant that his work aligned more with the French Nouveau Réalisme of Arman and Daniel Spoerri. Seriality (publication of works in multiples, particularly in the form of multiples) and repetition—the repetition of forms within a work—are, however, characteristics of Henderikse's work that can be seen as typical of the Nul Movement.

In 2001, Sherman de Jesus made a documentary film about Jan Henderikse. For this film, titled All Is Light, De Jesus received the Best International Documentary award at the New York International Independent Film & Video Festival. In 2013, Jan Hoet visited the studio in Eeklo on the occasion of a major retrospective exhibition by Kunstzolder.be, and the book Kaleidioscopia was released. It became the last publication by art guru Hoet. In 2017, the M HKA in Antwerp included a large wall of crates by Henderikse in its permanent collection exhibition. In 2018, the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam opened a solo exhibition of the artist under the title Alles en Niets.