International artist Jan Henderikse (Delft, 1937) studied at the Free Academy in The Hague and is one of the key players in European art after 1960. In 1959 Henderikse moved to Cologne, and shortly thereafter to Dusseldorf. While in Dusseldorf, one of the epicentres of the post-war European avant-garde, Henderikse made contact with the circle of international ZERO artists, though maintaining a certain degree of independence. In hindsight, these years can be considered as a ‘coming of age’, as a conceptual basis for the years that followed. 

Since the moment he left the Netherlands, Henderikse has never painted again. With the banks of the Rhine as his foraging grounds he created his first assemblages; wooden crates and panels filled with flotsam, plastic bottles, crown caps, and ampoules. In 1961, together with Armando, Henk Peeters and Jan Schoonhoven, Henderikse formed the Dutch Nul Group, which took part in several major international exhibitions. The exhibition ‘Nul’ at the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum in 1962, showed Henderikse’s installation of stacked beer crates, one of the first sponsored art project of the Netherlands.

Henderikse settled in Curaçao from 1963-67, working with found objects and photographs. His assemblages are, certainly for that time, perplexing amalgamations with a large degree of randomness regarding the choice of material. The first assemblages with coins originate from 1965 and are expressions of a recurring fascination for repetition, multitude and composition by means of a grid.

Henderikse moved to New York in 1968, the same year in which he showed 32 coin reliefs in his solo exhibition Jan Henderikse Uses Common Cents in the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum.The period from the mid-seventies to mid-eighties, once characterized by Henderikse as the end of traditional art – “no more art on the wall” – yielded a large amount of film material, portraying yet another slice of everyday life in Henderikse’s highly distinctive vocabulary. From the early eighties on, Henderikse published a vast number of artist’s books, many of which are included in major archives, libraries and museum collections worldwide.

Henderikse moved to Berlin in 1987-88 and kept a second studio there until 2001. The artist currently lives in Brooklyn, New York and Antwerp. Retrospective solo exhibitions in Schwerin and Kiel (2007), and recent contributions to group exhibitions in Dusseldorf, Nice, London, New York, Berlin, Johannesburg and Tokyo, reflect the ongoing and mounting interest in Henderikse’s multimedia oeuvre.