The dystopias of the past have become our reality.
Now is the time to envision new utopias.
I work primarily with painting, approaching perception as a relational process. The painting becomes a space in which different layers of reality—inner and outer, simultaneous and shifting—can coexist without hierarchy or narrative closure.
The diversity of my work is connected to a neurodivergent mode of attention: an openness to multiple directions, intensities and forms of perception existing alongside one another. Rather than consolidating these differences into a single recognisable style, I allow each work to develop according to its own internal logic.
When figures appear, they are not conceived as characters or fixed symbols, but as relational presences. They resist naturalistic depiction in order to remain open, differentiated and unstable.
In works without figures, space itself becomes the carrier of presence—a field in which perception can unfold, shift and find its own orientation.
Rather than illustrating ideas or proposing predetermined meanings, the work creates conditions for perception to emerge in its own time. Meaning remains open and arises through encounter.
This is where I locate the utopian potential of painting: not in a fixed image of a better world, but in the act of perceiving differently—open, unresolved, coexisting. A space where new ways of seeing and sensing can begin.
Selected works and available prints can be found in the respective sections of this site.selected Texts
Editorial Essay by Kuri Gralen
Plural Reality: On Perception and Figuration in the Work of Uwe Henneken
Uwe Henneken's paintings explore an expanded field of reality in which inner and outer spaces, temporal shifts, relational structures and states of simultaneous presence coexist. Their pictorial worlds have often been described as fairytale-like, fantastical, romantic or psychedelic. While these terms register the works' departure from the familiar logic of everyday experience, they only partially account for the particular mode of perception from which the paintings emerge.
Henneken's pictorial worlds are not rooted in escapism or illustrative fiction, but in an understanding of reality as layered, relational and plural. They give visual form to experiences that resist a purely functional or rational organisation of the world. What may initially appear fantastical or psychedelic can therefore be understood as the articulation of genuinely perceived states and relations that ordinarily remain difficult to represent.
The association with the psychedelic does not refer to substance-based or deliberately induced altered states. Henneken creates his works without the use of psychoactive substances. Their proximity to psychedelic visual languages arises instead from a mode of perception capable of holding multiplicity, simultaneity and inner differentiation within a single pictorial field. Visual parallels that viewers may recognise from their own experiences suggest not a shared origin, but structural affinities in the ways complex states of perception take visual form.
From this perspective, the fantastical is not simply a quality opposed to reality. It emerges at the point where conventional definitions of the real become insufficient for what the works make perceptible. Henneken's practice might therefore be understood as a form of expanded realism or plural reality, in which non-ordinary perception is approached not as an exception, but as another legitimate mode of experiencing and knowing the world.
The figures within these paintings function less as depicted entities than as points of condensation within the perceptual field—places where the painting's layered reality becomes momentarily legible without becoming fixed. To encounter them is not to identify a character, but to register a knot of relation: a site where inner and outer, familiar and strange, briefly hold together before dissolving again. In this sense the figure operates less as subject matter than as an instrument of perception itself, a device through which the painting's plural reality becomes, for a moment, apprehensible.
Diversity & Oneness
Text by Rudolph von Weust
Uwe Henneken's paintings invite a sustained encounter with forms of reality that remain open, layered and difficult to contain within a single interpretation. Across different periods of his work, figures, landscapes and spatial fields appear as manifestations of shifting states of perception and relation.
In many of the earlier paintings, solitary figures move through luminous, Arcadian landscapes. They seem suspended between orientation and disorientation, proximity and distance, departure and arrival. In later works, this movement increasingly gives way to images in which searching and finding, figure and environment, inner and outer space can no longer be clearly separated.
Henneken's practice is marked by a continuous transformation of styles, motifs and painterly approaches. Seen across time, it resists the kind of coherence that would announce itself immediately. Style shifts, motifs recede and resurface, painterly approaches are taken up and set aside. What connects one phase to the next is not a visible signature but a consistency of attention that only becomes apparent in retrospect—visible less within any single painting than across the arc of many. Coherence here is not a claim made in advance; it is something the body of work reveals only once enough of it exists to be seen together.
The work repeatedly returns to moments of transition. Landscapes become spaces of passage; figures emerge, dissolve or enter into unstable relations with their surroundings. These movements may evoke relocation, displacement and transformation, but they do not resolve into a fixed narrative. They remain open enough to connect personal, psychological and historical experience without reducing one to the other.
Existing images, cultural forms and art-historical echoes occasionally enter the paintings, not as quotations to be decoded, but as material that can be displaced, transformed and brought into new relations. Continuity therefore appears not as repetition, but as the capacity of forms to change while retaining traces of what preceded them.
The apparent diversity of Henneken's work is inseparable from its underlying oneness. Each work follows its own internal logic, yet all are connected by an interest in perception as something mobile, relational and transformative. Rather than presenting a stable image of the world, the paintings make visible a reality that is continually forming, dissolving and reorganising itself through encounter.