HENRIK EIBEN | MY SELECTED LITTLE ALPHABET
Press Release
Pablo's Birthday is pleased to announce 'my selected little alphabet,' Henrik Eiben's fifth solo show with the gallery.
In his most recent series, the artist continues his investigation with concepts of shape and volume, while in his making process, there is always a constant balance between contradiction and beauty. As he explains, his interest has moved towards the three-dimensionality of the work of art over the years. Weight, lightness, and colour play important roles in his explorations of materials, scale, spatial relationships, and his ever-expanding formal vocabulary.
A constant in Henrik Eiben's practice is to avoid categorization. For Eiben, a sculpture may have qualities of a drawing, and a painting may have qualities of a sculpture. In his new minimalistic constructions, we find a balancing act between pause, continuity, and expression, always infused by a playful sensuality and master use of colour and material.
"When creating, I use my youth, my shyness, and sometimes the uncertainty. That is how in my process I arrive, discover, and react to the "unknown," the "new "or the "different." Improvisation is not any more "a part", it is the composition itself because as an actor, you learn to listen and to see. All is in constant flux."
Henrik Eiben (1975 Tokyo, Japan) lives and works in Hamburg. The artist has exhibited broadly with the gallery and was featured solo in the following shows: "Daybreaker" (2019), "You'd Better Run" (2016), "Clarity" (2014), "Follow The Smoke Man" (2012). His work has been represented in solo and group institutional exhibitions throughout Europe and was most recently featured at Kunstraumpotsdam in the solo exhibition "OFF SITE" (2018).
Eiben studied at the Academy of Visual Arts and Design in Enschede, at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, and graduated in 2004 at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe. In 2010, he was artist-in-residence at Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado (FAAP), in São Paulo, Brazil. The latter influenced remarkably in his practice, where his art began to adopt a South American-esque embrace of sensuality, lightheartedness, and liberal use of colour, bringing it into conversation with the more reduced formal minimalist disposition from which he came.