Brian Henderson was born in Wicklow in 1950. He moved to New York in 1971 and lived there for over thirty years before returning to Ireland recently to live and work in Dublin. Over the years, Henderson's work has been consistent in its dedication to the process of painting as well as surface. The grand scale of his work, often executed as diptychs and triptychs, reveals the influence of his time in America and his affinity with painters like Brice Marden and Barnett Newman. However, despite the bold, loose brushstrokes and bright colouration of much of his work, there is a profound complexity to his enquiry. Henderson's paintings are the products of innumerable processes - aluminium supports are etched and sanded, primed, overlaid with hot wax, scraped with drywall blades and painted with layers of semi-dry oil - before they are arranged alongside panels of lead, brass, copper or plexi-glass. These paintings are a kind of archaeology for the artist, a stratification of his engagement with the world and a confirmation of his belief in the importance of paint as a medium.
Brian Henderson won the Carrols Award at the 1969/70 Irish Exhibition of Living Art and a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant in 2002. He was a committee member of the Project Arts Centre, Dublin from 1968 to 1971 and was elected a member of Aosdána in 2007. Henderson has exhibited his work in both solo and group shows with B4A, New York; Side Gallery, New York; Graphic Arts Gallery, Dublin; the Guinness Hop Store and the Rathmines Arts Festival, Dublin. His work is represented in the public collections of the Arts Council of Ireland, St. Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin, the OPW, Bank of Ireland, the Ulster Museum, the National Self Portrait Collection, the Central Bank of Ireland and the Shelbourne Hotel on St. Stephen’s Green.
Exhibitions with Taylor Galleries: 2009 Planned Palimpsests2004 Sangoma
1999 Stupa
1992 North, South, East, West Paintings and Drawings
1979
1973 (Dawson Gallery)