Tankstelle im Abendlicht (Aalbek)

Anton Henning is an adulating fan and a paradoxically harsh critic of Modernism, both in painting and in life. Painted in 2000, Tankstelle im Abendlicht (Aalbek) shows a petrol station bathed in the orange light of dusk. It has been depicted with an impressive, even calligraphic, conciseness. On the one hand, this theme is an everyday snippet from life in Germany, but on the other hand invokes the petrol stations of Hopper and Ruscha. The light allows Henning to prompt a sense of nostalgia in his viewers, as though this were some meaningful and emotional scene from our lives. At the same time, there remains the forceful implication that Tankstelle im Abendlicht (Aalbek) is the everyday epiphany of an artist and an aesthete, that his enthusiasm for life and for a certain moment of life, a certain scene, is here transmitted to the viewer via a monumental canvas. More and more people have commented on sincerity, dubbed the new irony, and its increasing place within contemporary art: Henning's Tankstelle im Abendlicht (Aalbek) shows this. It is an unashamedly beautiful painting of a banal scene, a celebration of modern life and modern living. At the same time, the almost calligraphic economy of means with which Tankstelle im Abendlicht (Aalbek) has been rendered - essentially in two colours and with very few brushstrokes - self-consciously demands that the viewer's attention be turned towards the act of painting as much as to the painting itself.