Henrik Have

Henrik Have's art has never been easily accessible. It invites deep contemplation. Then, when one engages with it, it is not easy to let go. Confronted with his art, one is struck by the works' immediate presence and fascination, their beauty, and their concentrated energy, intuitively giving the impression that a message is being conveyed. The incentive for the viewer lies, among other things, in the effort to decipher it.

The expression and content of the images cannot be confined to a single style or a specific artistic tradition. Nor can the pictorial elements be tied to a specific historical period. The foundation is a German/Western European cultural heritage, but this should be understood in a very broad sense.

Henrik Have's art never sets out to "depict" already occurred events, specific individuals, statistical scenarios, or, generally speaking, traditional motifs, even when his imagery becomes motive-referential. Rather, it is the "extension" of these frameworks, the development of something new — images never seen before, creating connections and reflections across time, space, and manner.

Portrait of the Day

A Restless Life

Henrik Have has painted a new and different exhibition, which is filled with a lot of restless life. The paintings are shown in Galleri Stalke in Studiestræde, and here the exhibition raises the simple question: Who is the painter?

Henrik Have is 41 years old and has lived near Ringkøbing in the Jutland countryside for 14 years with the short Jutland name: No. He paints here and lives together with his Polish-born wife, Eva.

He grew up in an active and lively environment surrounded by art and music. His father was a farmer, but Henrik Have had no ambition to take over the farm in Søsum. He became a teacher and painted a lot at the same time. But painting led to him becoming a student at the academy. The self-taught artist, however, taught at the academy. The painter had short courses in sculpture and, when Professor Albert Mertz was ill, Henrik Have temporarily took over at the academy.

Henrik Have has not always stayed strictly with painting. After discovering the Fluxus movement in the early 70s, he felt he had to stop painting. This artistic expression obviously no longer appealed to him. Instead, he created a series of book projects and began writing books.

The book, titled The Difference (which was published in 1974 and printed in 60 copies with something as unreadable as black text on black pages), gained significant personal importance for him. The book, which he sees today as a place between the image and text, gave the art students a three-year book project. All the money went into experimental book projects.

In 1982, however, he resumed painting. This was after exhibiting at the Holstebro Kunstmuseum in a show arranged by Jesper Knudsen, which later traveled to the Vejle Kunstmuseum.

Now Henrik Have is exhibiting again after a long break at Galleri Stalke in Copenhagen. His previous exhibition was with Svend Hansen in Bredgade. This time he shows at Galleri Stalke. Here, he has been called "somewhat prematurely old-fashioned as a refined colorist" (as some writers put it).

And he has not protested against that label. He feels, on the contrary, that he often has been close to avant-garde art's warmest nerve.

Gunnar Jespersen

(politiken 17.11.1987)

Good Art Haves

"Stalke" is a tandem consisting of both Stalke Galleri and Stalke Project. The gallery is associated with a handful of some of the best and most experimental contemporary artists—Stalke Project even more so. The Stalke list includes names such as Torben Ebbesen, Thorbjørn Laustsen, Margrethe Sørensen, and, not least, the painter Henrik Have.

"Painter"—this is, relatively speaking, the classification of someone who, over the past nearly three decades, has hardly adhered to Fluxus-like experimentalism, but whose presence nonetheless radiates such a sense of form. The works are themselves intriguing to behold, as they justify such a return to prominence through the emergence of a predominantly concept-driven art in images. That this is justified—when it comes to Henrik Have—is beyond doubt. What exactly this image can do, something that, instead of being relegated to installation and concept, remains in the realm of Have’s work—it can indeed do.

Henrik Have’s images are unique. They do not resemble anything else. When you discover in the late 20th century that avant-garde is by no means dead but merely has changed so much that it now no longer even calls itself such, then drawing becomes art’s great quality. It is not mechanical descriptions of others, nor descriptions for others. The blending of color and overview in Henrik Have’s images is deeply demanding, but also liberating in its sense of tradition—and it is thereby the point of entry to their uniqueness.

The exhibition consists of 14 drawings and paintings, all of which are significant in their accumulation of allegorical remnants, drawing elements, and language: expressive in their use of color and text; narrative in their progress. "Gothic Ratification" is the name of one of these works, which allows the rudiments of landscape painting’s deep perspective to create space within the composition.

The greatest experience—the experience understood as a marvel—is to be found in these paintings and drawings. They exude a modernistic and expressive mode—from the thematic level to the craftsmanship. There is never any fully completed whole nor any entirely skeletal framework. These are skeletons where one has carved into the flesh, which are full of vitality and pulsate with an engaging manner that points forward to new movements of form. It is challenging, insistent, but, above all, always effective and touching.

Here you find both body and movement, balance and space, composition and structure, recognition and detachment, passion, drama, irony, and paradox. Moreover, the fragmentary and fragmented are nevertheless placed in contrast—in the whole. Henrik Have’s images are fragmented wholes, wholes of fragments.

The word that brings Have’s images together is a category and also a "situation." A situation is a relatively abstract attentiveness to the world; relatively limited because its boundaries cannot be fixed, as they are found in the situation—at any given time—and where something is connected to something else and something is not. The situation reorders the rest of the world as it is perceived.

Henrik Have’s images do this. And thereby also provide the best explanation for why one looks at images today (again). The image itself can emerge, detached from fragmentation, abstraction, concept, sensation, and emotion. Within the framework and against the norm.

By Poul Erik Tøjner

Mysterious Life

Henrik Have's Magical Aura

Henrik Have's exhibition in Galleri Stalke, Studiestræde 3. Open Wednesday, Thursday, Friday 14–17:30. Saturday 12–15. Until December 6.

The exhibition is new, different, and full of restless life. The 43-year-old Henrik Have has created a large collection of oil paintings, watercolors, and mixed-media works, which are on display in Galleri Stalke.

In the foreword to the exhibition catalog, it is noted that Henrik Have’s art has never been particularly accessible. It can be challenging. The paintings and images are filled with swirling elements, which seem to depict a mystical life. They are favored by an obscure use of letters and text, which float around like an enigmatic stream. But magic always does that, and that is precisely the point.

But let us look at the messages, which we can directly interpret—even if we notice the playful whims of multiplicity along the way. Based on the colors’ interplay, Henrik Have paints spontaneously, smoothly, and quite easily. Sometimes he carefully approaches the canvas just to touch it lightly. He arranges his images based on fragments from reality, and in the movement of the colors, we discover a table swinging legs and sometimes the hint of a female figure. The result is living new images, which contain so much surplus that they seem overwhelming, and at the same time lovely and beautiful.

It is exciting to see how Henrik Have brings so many things together. In the large painting Gothic Artificiality, he builds his composition over an open white diagonal shape. He fills it with mystical letters, which we sometimes can interpret—and sometimes cannot understand a word of. Around it, he paints green, and he enlivens the soft green with light blue hints, small, quick suggestions of the nearby red and a touch of yellow, so that the colors vibrate and live across the large surface.

It is an exhibition I am happy to see, because it shows a painter in the midst of an inspiring evolution. There is a living present and future in Henrik Have's paintings. And at the same time, he has something so sophisticatedly old-fashioned as a refined colorist.

GUNNAR JESPERSEN

(politiken 16.11.1987)

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