Imagine a big, stylish lounge with warm-hued walls cov-ered with large-scale paintings, pedestals with sculptures, sleek armchairs and sofas. I could have been talking about any elegant living room, but this is actually the work of the German artist Anton Henning. Discovering his instal-lations, for which much thanks goes to a large exhibition at Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall, I became fascinated with the spaces he creates and how the viewer is invited to enter and observe the installation from within. Here, interiors do not just frame or host the artworks, but form a large part of it. The German term Gesamtskunstwerk —meaning a total work of art— has hardly seemed more relevant. The Anton Henning universe comes in a cer-tain palette of colours; luscious, organic shapes in warm

apartamento - Manker

ANTON HENNINGLoving the living room

INTERVIEW BY HELENA NILSSON STRÄNGBERGPHOTOGRAPHY BY ACHIM HATZIUS

shades is a recurrent theme and his work is full of ironic references to the masters of modernism like Duchamp and Picasso. Another frequent theme is his ‘pin-ups:’ playfully voyeuristic nude paintings that are unafraid to challenge what is considered good taste.After several years of living and working in London and New York, Anton Henning decided to move back to his native Germany in the early ‘90s and took over an old community farm near Berlin in the former East German countryside. Together with his wife and three children, he has now grown into the once almost overwhelmingly large space. During our conversations, I got to follow Anton through the shady streets of New York in the ‘80s, unintentional squatting in London and the fall of the Ber-lin Wall, while eventually learning about the best way to grow your own pumpkins.

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Anton, you seem to have lived a bit all over the place and settled down in this small village of Manker 20 years ago. Are you originally from Berlin?Yes, indeed. I’m a Berliner, just like my par-ents, my grandparents and some of my great grandparents. My mother’s father was born in Moabit, his mother was a widow who had a pub on the corner of Birkenstrasse and my grandfather was raised in the bar. Later, when he was old enough and could afford it, he bought the place and the corner pub is still standing on Birkenstrasse today. My father’s father came from Pommern, ran off as a young man to become a sailor, but later started his own pharmaceutical company. In search of something equivalent to Viagra, he accidently invented an explosive.

And what about your parents?My father wanted to become a lawyer, but after the Second World War the family business was in such bad shape that he had to rescue the company in the late ‘50s. My mother used to be a stewardess in one of the first Lufthansa crews to go to Rio de Janeiro, Dhaka, and all those places, in the Super Constellation aircraft. It was very glamourous to be a stewardess at that time. She is still best friends with her former colleagues.

Were you into art and painting already as a child? I don’t think I was exceptionally creative as a child; it was just very practical to paint and give paintings away for birthdays and Christmas. I got particularly interested in art when I was about 16 years old, having seen an exhibition of post-war American painting. I especially liked Rauschenberg’s combine paintings of the ‘60s and De Kooning’s Abstract Expressionism. Strangely enough, I never cared much for Jack-son Pollock’s drip-paintings. I found them too simple, tricky and obvious.

I heard you got expelled from your art school in Karlsruhe. Why, were you a rebel?I didn’t really see myself as a rebel. I just found it difficult to adapt to the conformity of art school. I didn’t really like school in general. After graduating I went to Spain straight to learn Spanish, and I really loved being away. When I left Karlsruhe, I decided to go to London to work on my paintings. Even though there wasn’t much squatting going on in London,

I was actually squatting in a house there, al-though without knowing it.

Really, how did that happen?I was incredibly naïve. I paid rent to a crook who said he was the owner of the home. One day the real owner stood in my home and said: ‘Who are you and what are you doing here?’ I was just as shocked, wondering what he was doing in my space.

Where did this unintentional squatting take place?In the East End, near the Brick Lane market. If you come from Bethnal Green, pass the ba-gel shops, there’s this little road called Bacon Street. It was a really strange building; it didn’t even have a proper door. I had to climb over a fence and a door to get into what I thought was my space. And I couldn’t really lock the door to my home, so I had to use wooden bars instead (laughs).

What a story!I must say I was quite scared. And I didn’t have a phone, obviously, since this was before mo-bile phones.

What was the area like back then?It was really quite filthy, but I loved it. Com-ing from a sort of moderate bourgeois Berlin background, this fulfilled all my stereotypes of city life (laughs). It wasn’t chic at all. The only artists I know who were living there back then were Gilbert and George, and I think they still do. But I never met them; I was a kid and they were already famous artists.

That London place sounds quite different to your home in Manker. Can you tell me some-thing about the way you live today? This house used to be a farm house. It’s very typical for the area to have four buildings like we do here; the living house near the road, two stables on the sides and the big barn in the back. But since this was East Germany, the last time it was used as a proper farm was in the 1940s. When this became Soviet occupied ter-ritory, they expropriated the farmers, put them in blue working suits on a Russian tractor and told them that from now on they had to work for the Kolkhoz. Nobody maintained the place very well, so when I took over a little more than 20 years ago it was quite run down. It took almost four years to fix it, and I’ve lived

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Above: The Manker Melody Makers’ Lounge, 1999, installation view. Courtesy of Galerie für zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig, photographer: Jörg von Bruchhausen, Berlin. Below: Interieur No. 510, 2012. Courtesy of Collection of Magasin 3 Konsthall, Stock-

holm, photographer: Christian Saltas. Previous page: Interieur No. 227, 2004. Courtesy of private collection, France, photographer: Jörg von Bruchhausen, Berlin.

apartamento - Anton Henning

here since then. My family and I really enjoy it here because of all the space, which in the beginning felt much like a pair of shoes that was too big. Now they are almost custom-fi t.

Did you do all the work on the house yourself?No, because then I would still be doing it. I had a lot of help, since it is quite large. I lived in New York before and I loved living there, but I had enough of city life. I decided to come here because I wanted to have more space and be closer to nature.

Why did you grow tired of New York, really?

I mean, it sounds arrogant to say you’ve grown tired of New York. It’s one of the most excit-ing cities in the world, especially for a young person. You meet a lot of people, you see a lot, the city just fi lls you up with energy and inspiration. I lived there for more or less fi ve years, loving the pace, speed and the beat of the city. I sold my paintings and felt completely independent, with the illusion that this would be normal. At that time I had a gallery show in the city and a museum exhibition at the Univer-sity of Oklahoma. While I was preparing these exhibitions I met someone and fell in love, and for that reason I moved to the city.

So you moved for love. That’s very classic.

Where did you live back then?I found a loft that used to be a stable for car-riage horses before there were cars. There are lots of old stables on the West Side and my place was in Chelsea; at that time the area hadn’t yet become very trendy. I had my place on Tenth Avenue, between 18th and 19th street. Back then there were only a couple of galleries and the Dia Foundation there. Later it became more fashionable, and today ob-viously all the galleries are there. But back then it was completely different and quite in-teresting, because there were spooky streets where shootings happened, next to perfectly

okay streets. I had a big space and a galler-ist who sold my work, until one day he just disappeared.

Wait, what do you mean he ‘disappeared?’He just disappeared. I know that he’s dead now. He must have had many enemies. That was a tough experience, because he owed me a lot of money. And you know, the question eventually came up if I was going to stay there, go back, or go somewhere else. At that time Germany was the most interesting place be-cause so much was happening: the unifi cation of a split country. Every time I was in Berlin I was always thinking that I wanted to be a part of that interesting moment.

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Were you actually in Berlin when the wall fell?Yes, I was. I remember extremely well what I was doing that night. I was renting a very nice building in Kreuzberg: a four-storey small fac-tory building where two fl oors were mine, and the other two I subletted to my best friends. The house used to be a printer’s shop, and later it was bought by the publishing house Nicolai Ver-lag, so I had to move out. Anyway, one evening me and my friends were watching the evening news and they said that it looked like the wall would be be opened that night. Since the wall was only like half a mile away, we decided to go the part by Heinrich-Heine-Strasse. Nobody

had come through yet, but we were there on top of the roof of our car to have a better view. And we greeted the fi rst people that came through, it was amazing! From there we went to Checkpoint Charlie, where there was a huge party going on.

Wow, that is almost unbelievable. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who was there at the actual wall when it came down.It was absolutely amazing. We were expecting the fi rst people to come through. And we still weren’t sure if what they said on the news was just a fl uke or a mistake. How did you feel when you saw all of this hap-pen?

Well, you know, this was part of the peaceful his-tory of life! Checkpoint Charlie was an important point of the Cold War; people were separated by the wall. When the wall fell, those people could come together again. Everybody was in tears; it was a beautiful big moment. And that was all one could feel. I couldn’t look any further.

Was that the moment when you decided to move back to Germany?Then I prepared that show in New York and decided to come back to Germany. I moved to the East German countryside, because at the time I had had enough of the city and the

repeating patterns of city life and communica-tion. It had become too predictable and my star was fading (laughs).

I’d like to speak a bit about your art. Several of your installations, such as Oktagon für Her-ford, are complete room installations. Some of them remind me of a fi lm set for or a luxurious mobile home. How do you describe these kind of rooms yourself?They are sculpture, stage, screen sets and painting in one work. I offen make paintings of imaginary sculptures that are set up on a plinth that I stage in a kind of interior setting. The great architect Karl-Friedrich Schinkel was also a painter of his architectural fantasies.

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Previous spread: Charly’s Room,1996, courtesy of the artist, photographer: Anton Henning.Above: Interieur No. 500, 2012, courtesy of the artist, photographer: Jörg von Bruchhausen, Berlin.Below: Interieur No. 478, 2011, courtesy of the artist, Photographer: Jörg von Bruchhausen, Berlin.

What is the difference between placing your art in an existing space and building your own settings and furniture? It’s a more intense experience for me to create my own space, unless the space given is inter-esting. The smallest installation I made was in a box that measured a quarter of a cubic metre. You looked at it through a spy peephole in the door, getting the illusion that it was a big space.

I read that someone described your art as walking into a cinemascope movie screen where a cacophony of painted scenarios un-fold, and I think that is a pretty good picture of your work. Are you infl uenced by the fi lm

medium or even any specifi c cinematic works?That’s a nice description. I like it when the arti-fi cial becomes natural and the natural becomes artifi cial. I don’t differentiate between abstrac-tion and representation; everything is abstract and everything is representational.

Is colour important to you?Colour is absolutely fundamental! I don’t really like to use only bright and clear colours. It is important to build up a kind of harmony be-tween colours so that they don’t kill each other. How come you often paint self portraits?Why do you look at yourself in the mirror? I look at something that I think I know well from

the inside. But what I see of myself in the mirror differs from other people’s perception of me; they know much better what I look like. That is the reason why we are interested in looking at ourselves in photos and in moving pictures. We only have a sense of ourselves, but no picture.

In many of your works, there is a direct refer-ence to art history’s masters such as Matisse, Picasso or Duchamp, either in motif or title. Is it an homage or are you being ironic?It is an ironic homage. But they are only col-leagues: great colleagues. I have a lot of re-spect for artists who work independently from the mainstream, artists who mainly work for

themselves, instead of curators or the bigger audience. They don’t try to fulfi ll expectations but set the standards themselves. Contemporary artists have to be way ahead of curators. If not, they become illustrators of curatorial concepts.

Can you tell me something about the many nude paintings?I guess that if you want to be a good artist, you have to observe things well.I don’t think it makes you a voyeur to adore the naked body of a woman. It makes you human! I look at people for analysis and observe nature.

Where do you fi nd inspiration?I fi nd inspiration almost everywhere, even for

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instance in newspaper headlines if they are funny or drastic enough.

You seem to be working very three-dimension-ally most of the time. What role do sculptures or installations play in your work?I think in all kinds of dimensions and some-times I don’t think so much at all. There is not really a difference in the way I think of my installations and my own home.

Do you have a favourite part of your home?I think it is the kitchen, as I love cooking. Cook-ing is very direct and has a lot in common with the way I paint. I really like to eat and luckily my wife and my three lovely children like it too, so we cook a lot together. I love being near my family and I start missing them after only half a day when I’m travelling. We always take time to eat together, even if they’re busy with school or after-school activities. On weekends we like to either go for long walks or go sail-ing, and in the winter when the lake is frozen we go ice skating. I also do ice yachting, this sort of winter sailing on ice. My father used to do it too with his friends. It’s like the coolest thing you can do in the winter when there is ice, really fascinating!

It sounds like you enjoy outdoor life.Yes, that’s what you should do when you live in the country. We’re not farmers, but we have a green house and a vegetable garden that supply us with a lot of vegetables. From an economical point of view it doesn’t make much sense because it is more expensive to grow your own things than to go to the organic supermarket. But at least you can see how it grows, and I think it’s so important that the children know how these things work. And it tastes so much better! As a city person it is difficult, but I think once you’re in the country you should know.

Your home and lifestyle seem so idyllic: mov-ing away from the city to start a new life in the countryside, living with your family near na-ture. How important is Manker for your work?Trust me, it’s not as idyllic as you may think (laughs). This is the typical city-art-crowd stere-otype. You cannot live anywhere in Germany where you are closer to 20th century German history, which as we all know is not particu-larly glorious, than here. What I am trying to say is that where our home is located, people

have been living under dictatorship from 1933 until the wall came down. This leaves deep im-pressions on their mentality. Not everyone has come to terms with our capitalist democracy. They proclaim a kind of nostalgic glorification of dictatorship of whatever kind. Here you have the edginess of rural ignorance, post-commu-nist revanchism and neo-Nazism. Idyllic is a cliché. I don’t think my neighbours know what kind of a art I make, but they think that I’m famous so they respect us. Mutual respect is all you can ask for, as you cannot be friends with everyone. And the paintings that I have inside of me, I could paint anywhere in the world.

Do you still go into Berlin sometimes?Yes, we visit friends, go to the movies, see exhi-bitions, take the children to museums. And we love going to the opera. I enjoy city life every once in a while, but soon I have enough. I must say I really like it out here. This feels more like home now. But I love Berlin, especially the old western parts, because that’s what I used to know. Before the wall came down, West Ber-lin was like one big village where you would move around a lot. But now it’s so big, that in one way it has become more provincial. People don’t go from Prenzlauer Berg to Charlotten-burg; it is too far! They stay in their so-called kiez, like a village within the city. You often see this provincial attitude in Berlin.

I absolutely agree.It’s not like London, or New York where you commute so much. On the other hand, it makes it human to live in Berlin, because you don’t have this feeling of rushing in and rushing out, trying to make as much money as possible so that you can survive or make a career. It’s kind of cosy. You live in Charlottenburg and then you’re happy in Charlottenburg, or Schöneberg or Kreuzberg or whatever.

So which is your Berlin kiez when you’re in town?Charlottenburg. I like how there are still some really nice old shops there that have been there for generations. Not everything is new, you know.

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