BILL HENSON Generative Gaps

ill Henson is preparing for an upcoming show. He says that ‘new pictures grow out of old pictures. With these recently completed works there has been a twenty-two year gestation period.’ Particular modes of figuration, themes, and textures have remained interesting to the artist over his career: young people in the fragile dawn of their adulthood, architectural space from the suburbs of Melbourne to ancient Egypt, skin that looks like marble, marble that looks like it knows something we don’t. For him, there has been a pleasure in looking back through his own archive in preparation for this show at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, and in his experience of having ‘looked at these works in the original contact proof-sheets (made from the old negatives) for years. I had always found them interesting and had annotated the proof-shots accordingly, but I never got around to resolving what I needed to do to complete them in a final print; that is, until