Bill Henson

Born in 1955 in Melbourne (AU)
Lives and works in Sydney (AU)

Untitled

1983-1984
Colour photographs, triptych
74 x 99 cm
Year of Purchase: 1990

This Australian artist, who represented his country at the 1995 Venice Biennale, has hardly shown his work at all in France. The series Untitled, produced in 1983-1984, in black and white, which encompasses portraits, nudes, architectures, reproductions of paintings, and bits of décor, is the real moment of acknowledgement of his work in Europe.
Bill Henson’s Baroque, Mannerist, Expressionist art communicates before it is understood. Through the unity of tone and form, his images have an unparalleled emotional coherence underscored by the dramatic effect of the large wall of images, because, with Henson, the installation is as important as the shots. He arranges his photographs in groups of two or three, which creates opaque and fragmented narratives in which the formal qualities of the isolated images are accentuated by the logic of the arrangement.
There are few predominant motifs: architectural details of theatres and Baroque palaces, women’s faces in repose, and above all abandoned and naked young teenagers, absorbed by their own degradation and suffering. Henson’s subjects are imbued with a sentiment of a scope that lends them a dramatic resonance. His characters seem like actors in an impossible life. Yet a truth does pierce these images which are at once terrifying in their beauty, and profoundly disturbing in their solemnity.
Everything is spuriously beautiful. This goes as much for the architectural details providing inverse images as for the characters whose expressionless eyes stare into space. These motifs become the framework through which we watch the central theatre of violation and despair.

^{Béatrice Josse}