FRIEDA explores how fine art and tattoo intertwine with A Closer Look: Henbo Henning

Both, according to Henning, are places he makes art. Now, Philly can check out his style with A Closer Look: Henbo Henning, a free show on the walls at Old City’s FRIEDA gallery through September 15, 2024.

What tattoo artists know

In 1981, Marcia Tucker, an art historian and founder of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, wrote that “serious tattoo artists know that their work, by its very nature, has permanently altered another human being. It changes not only the client’s self-image but also the way others will see the tattooed person for the rest of his or her life.”

We see tattoos everywhere now, not just bulging on the biceps of baristas and musicians, but encircling the ankles of physicians and tech freelancers, and peeking out from expensive yoga pants. They’ve even appeared on members of the United States House and Senate. But is tattoo a form of art with a capital A?

Evoking Animé, wabi-sabi, and Basquiat

This question comes front and center at FRIEDA’s A Closer Look. The exhibition features large, hyperkinetic paintings by Henning that share many similarities with his tattoos. Acrylic and ink canvases teem with imaginary creatures that morph from shape to shape: a superhero with a television head; a one-eyed, menacing pizza slice; a kite-worthy koi fish; a three-eyed blob. Henning calls his subjects “monsters,” but much like the artist himself, they convey a cheerful goofiness and a Crayola Crayon sensibility that delights more than frightens.

Larger figures are mosaics of countless smaller ones—eating, disgorging, and cavorting. His triptych panels don’t just abut; their vivid creatures begin on one board and writhe or wriggle seamlessly onto the next.

These pieces reveal the influence of Henning’s early delight in children’s animated programming and later attraction to Japanese animé, fantasies such as Lord of the Rings, and nature imagery of all sorts. “I’ve always had an affinity for strange creatures: octopuses, polliwogs, axolotls, monsters great and small, real or fictional,” says the artist in the exhibit program. “I fantasize that they live amongst us, happily going about their day-to-day existence. I’m sure they took your missing sock or TV remote, hoarding it as treasure.”

More seriously, Henning often refers to his style as wabi-sabi, an ancient Japanese philosophy that teaches an appreciation for the beauty in all things, especially hiding underneath the surface of what seems to be broken.

Two pieces in the show, done in acrylic and oil stick, have a looser, more freeform style that abandons the strict black outlining convention of tattoo. Several attendees of Henning’s June 19 talk at FRIEDA remarked that these paintings remind them of work by Jean-Michel Basquiat.

A human (and Henbo) tattoo history

Henning, who grew up in England’s industrial northwest, studied art and design at London Roads Studio, followed by a film and animation degree at Manchester University. But after 10 years of unsatisfying, non-art-related jobs, he gravitated to tattoo. “There’s a romance to tattoo,” he explains. “It’s rare that you touch another person in the world of art. This work is highly personal and impermanent.” It lives only as long as the person.

Henning trained initially with a portrait artist and inked mostly black, white, and gray images that he likens to etchings. Once established as a sought-after tattooist, however, he transitioned to blazing color. His work has been reproduced as prints and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and printed on clothing and packaging. In 2022, he was invited by Nft Now to paint a mural at Art Basel Miami. The art education department of Mural Arts Philadelphia is now considering a collaboration.

Henning moved to New York City in 2016, attracted by the tremendous opportunities available in the global center of tattoo. The Big Apple was the first city to legalize inking, which only happened in 1997. Yet, evidence of human tattoos dates back 5,300 years. Later, tattoos were common among Egyptian nobility, found on female mummies from around 2000 B.C.E. In the United States today, according to the Pew Research Center, 32 percent of people have at least one tattoo, most commonly to commemorate someone or something.

Honoring Indigenous roots

Elana Kaufler—a 23-year-old who left art school and now studies sociology, philosophy, psychology, and political science—attended Henning’s afternoon drawing workshop at FRIEDA and was thrilled with the quirky characters and complex compositions on display. Kaufler got her first tattoo, a bunny, at age 16 in memory of her beloved grandmother. She now has 25 tattoos in all, the number representing the age at which she says science considers the brain fully developed into adulthood.

All of Kaufler’s tattoos have a deep emotional resonance for her. “I look at the human body like a canvas, but living and breathing,” she says, adding that her tattoos are “like armor, a safety blanket, a projection of what I perceive as my mental and emotional strength.” Born in Guatemala with Mayan ancestry, Kaufler was adopted into a Jewish American family as an infant. She says that tattoos have a big place in Indigenous cultures as symbols of power and marking rites of passage. Her tattoos help her celebrate and connect with her Mayan roots.

Healing visible and invisible wounds

Both Kaufler and Henning emphasize the collaborative nature of tattoo creation. Based on her own experience, Kaufler says, “It takes a lot of mental, emotional, and physical energy to create these designs because you’re using your brain, you're using your soul and your emotions to connect.” As a client she adds, “You’re trusting this person to make something on your body. It’s a lifelong connection. I remember every single artist who tattooed on me.”

That artist-client collaboration can become therapeutic when people use tattoos as a way to cover or embellish scars from surgery, trauma, or even self-harm. Henning considers it a great privilege when someone chooses him in these situations. He believes tattoo is a good way of taking back control of one’s own body. He also notes that sometimes the scars are emotional but not visible. “Obviously it can be sensitive and people have told me some deep stories,” he says. Whether the wound is physical or psychological, “I'm just there to listen.”

So, is there a dichotomy between tattoo and art? In an interview for Nepenthes NY, Henning concludes, “I’m not a tattooer who makes art, I’m just an art maker. For me, tattooing is the same as painting. I do it because I love it.”

At top: Matthew “Henbo” Henning (top right) leads a community “monster”-drawing workshop at FRIEDA. (Photo by Nadie Kopp Photography for FRIEDAcommunity.)