Jan Henderikse

Untitled (Holland), 1962/2010

In 1959 Jan Henderikse moved to Cologne and further to Düsseldorf where he got in contact with the ‘Zero’ Group founded by Heinz Mack and Otto Piene in 1957. The German artists worked since 1959 in close contact with the ‘Nul’ group (Armando, Henderikse, Peters, Schoonhoven) in Holland, the ‘Noveaux Réalistes’ in Paris (Arman, Klein, Raysse, Spoerri, Tinguely, et al.), and the Italien group ‘Azimut’  (Fontana, Manzoni, Castellani, Dadamaino). After having changed his place of residence, the artist stopped his early informal painting period and started to organize everyday materials, trash and fancy consumer items into serially conceived assemblages. He glued discarded natural and plastic corks, screw-top lids, parts of toys, bottles and tins, empty packages and electrical components, ampoules and spray cans into empty fruit crates, packing them serially and or structuring them loosely. For a ‘Painting’ exhibition in Antwerp 1962 he piled up empty fruit crates to build a fragile ‘painterly’ ready-made. The emerging structures seem like chaotic post-informal Allover or represent a serial order. This approach between chance and concept, order and chaos, ready-made and aesthetically defined structure, reality and idealization characterizes the Dutch artist’s work until these days.