Kent Henricksen is an artist best known for embroidered paintings and immersive installations. Henricksen creates faux style period rooms where scenes of light-hearted innocence become dark vignettes of sadism and emotional aggression, bad dreams layered overtop the surface of good ones. Henricksen's work constructs a field of surfaces: architecture becomes pattern, pattern gives way to framed canvases, which in turn become places for threaded drawing. He lives and works in New York City and Cold Spring, NY.
His work has been the focus of numerous solo and group museum exhibitions including the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach, The Gold Standard (2006) and Greater New York at PS 1/MOMA; ARS 06, Museum of Contemporary Art KIASMA, Helsinki, Finland; Crafty, curated by Lisa Tung, Sandra and David Bakalar Gallery, Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, and Pricked: Extreme Embroidery, at the Museum of Art and Design, New York.
Gallery exhibtions include Paul Kasmin, New York; John Connelly Presents, New York; Hiromi Yoshii, Tokyo; Arario Gallery, Seoul; Galleria Glance, Torino; c/o – Atle Gerhardsen, Berlin; and Mario Diacano, Boston. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the Acadia Summer Arts Program and finalist for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. Residencies include Wave Hill in the Bronx and LES Artist Alliance.
Henricksen has lectured at many universities and institutions, including The Rubin Museum in New York, Ringling College of Art and Design, and the Acadia Summer Art Program. He has taught children through the Joan Mitchell Art Foundation serving under privileged New York City school children.
Henricksen’s work has been reviewed in numerous publications including the NY Times, Art in America, HyperAllergic and White Hot Magazine to name a few. Roberta Smith in the New York Times describes Henricksen’s work by saying it “dazzles on every front — skill, color, narrative suggestion, pictorial complexity”.
His work is in the permanent museum collections of the Hirshhorn Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, The Fogg Museum at Harvard and the Bass Museum of Art in Miami to name a few.