LOOK MUM NO HANDS!

Hannes Heinrich (b. 1989) is a figurative painter, recently graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich (Klasse Kneffel). His work has an easy, natural exuberance, a riot of colour and psychedelic-type patterns, Matisse-like brushstrokes and woven grids. His motives are often art historical, as if taken straight out of 19th century academic paintings. There is the myth of Zeuxis and Parrhasius, competing for status of best painter, Butades' daughter, Kora, tracing her lover’s shadow and wood grain belonging to the carpenters table, two times removed from its Platonic ideal. In his work however, painting’s capacity for illusion lies not at the origin of painting, but is treated as one option out of many available for the painter. Resemblance no longer belongs to a discourse of the copy and the original, but a Road Runner world happy to be full of simulacra, copies were no originals exist.