Can Henne is a Visual Artist & Lives and Works in Berlin
I prefer analog painting over digital works since 2017, but photography and digital imaging have never left me and remain important in my work. I used to immerse myself in different artistic fields for several years, with the ambition to learn the essence of them until I finally got into figurative oil painting. And so I’m a skilled restaurator, sculptor, set designer, media designer, and digital artist. My subjects explore the texture of the human world, psychological states, and the pervasive fabric of reality, with dreamlike moods emerging in composed, fictional spaces and scenarios.
While I prefer to live a seemingly ordinary life, I complement it in my work and studies with a touch of the supernatural and ethereal, the mysterious and magical. In my art I narrate through composed settings about another context of life. It is an alternative space which detracts from the usual representation of reality. Similar to a Dreamscape or a visual theater.
I’m always modifying and shifting my focus, combining the skillset I gathered through time and my never ending search for a new expression and composition.
I experiment by collecting ideas and images and putting them together like a collage where an unexpected situation emerges which further develops while painting. It’s a pretty varying approach and course in every new work. Yet on the canvas I always begin with a drawing and an underpainting that starts the process. In further layers adding other objects or figures completes the theme. Some areas remain unfinished resolved in dirty strokes or abstracted.
Form and realism in painting is shaped by color, texture, and tonality; in sculpture through space and light, in digital imaging, it is the compositional shoving of pixels; and in photography, framed substantiality. The stage teaches the potency of dramaturgic presence. I make use of all of them in my paintings as well as of the imaginary which is part of any creation.
What I have found exciting so far is when viewers interpret what they see and ascribe a meaning to it that I have not seen before, so the work expands beyond my intentions. However, it has already got its own life when the image emerged.
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Works
Originals / Prints
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(soon to come, email me when you have a question)